‘Slanted Floors’
Pushing the tiny-venue trend to an extreme, Billy McEntee’s exquisite two-hander unfolds inside an apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with room for only six audience members. A couple’s day transpires in quick bursts and slow reveries: Kaplan (Adam Chanler-Berat) works via video calls and messes around online; then Teddy (Kyle Beltran) comes home, and they (and the theatergoers squished together on the couch) share dinner. The director Ryan Dobrin offers total access, including moments of nudity, both physical and emotional. What seems like an up-close domestic portrait, though, is also an intense morality play about being an audience. It demonstrates the ways that a listener’s fluctuating attention can become the most thrilling thing in the world … and the most cruel. HELEN SHAW
Through June 26 at an undisclosed location in Brooklyn.
‘Can I Be Frank?’
Morgan Bassichis’s galvanizing tribute to Frank Maya — a groundbreaking gay comedian who died in 1995 of AIDS-related heart failure — is near the end of its third New York run. Here’s a rare chance to experience two signature New York voices: Bassichis’s hilarious stage persona as a hot-to-trot narcissist (Helen Shaw called the vibe “part Jane Krakowski on ‘30 Rock,’ part swan attacking you in a park”), and Maya’s snarky Queens Everyman. Bassichis recreates Maya’s old routines and also repurposes Maya’s comic bits, like reading adoring letters from dead celebrities. The immensely entertaining work (directed by Sam Pinkleton) functions similarly: a correspondence between living and dead artists, all of it set on fire by Bassichis’s rage at our still-broken world.
Through June 27 at Soho Playhouse, Manhattan. Read the full notebook.
‘I’m Almost There’
Todd Almond plays a romantically bruised quasi-Odysseus in his fantastical (almost) solo musical, in which a man attempts — epically — to get from his upstairs apartment to the guy waiting at his front door. His descent becomes surreal: On the stairs, he encounters sirens (in the form of seductive neighbors) and monsters (in the form of crazy neighbors) who delay him, in some cases, for years. With the help of two other musicians, Almond narrates the wild tale about this quintessentially New York quest while sitting at a piano; he’s like Homer, but with a deep contempt for brunch. In 2024, Elisabeth Vincentelli called it “a sneakily, formally daring experiment in pared-down musical theater that connects with both mind and heart.” In the current outing, directed again by the super-deft David Cromer, Almond’s gorgeous tone is often archly hilarious, yet there’s a sadder chord underneath. Why is it so hard just to let someone in?
Through June 28 at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn. Read the original review.
‘A Woman Among Women’
LCT3 remounts Julia May Jonas’s family melodrama, which is part backyard soap, part woman-forward reworking of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons.” As in Miller’s play, the sins of one generation punish the next, though in Jonas’s version, the compromised parent (Dee Pelletier) runs a wellness center in super-progressive Northampton, Mass., where she’s a pillar of her bustling community. According to Jesse Green, reviewing it at the Bushwick Starr in 2024, Jonas “builds this world exquisitely, calibrating the revelations like doses of arsenic, then chasing them with amusing distractions.” The director Sarah Cameron Hughes’s inclusive staging — the audience is asked to join a clapping song — and much of the superb original cast (notably Brittany K. Allen and Zoë Geltman) return.
Through June 28 at the Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center Theater, Manhattan. Read the original review.
‘Dad Don’t Read This’
Eliya Smith’s keen-eyed portrait of teen loneliness transfers to Greenwich House Theater, where the show’s four high school friends (led by Amalia Yoo, a standout in “John Proctor Is the Villain”) will once again conduct chaotic slumber parties, squabble over computer games and — reluctantly — lose the sweetness of childhood. Writing about this show’s earlier outing at St. Luke’s Theater, Helen Shaw said that Smith writes with “a still-sticky adolescent mixture of wild feeling and zoned-out alienation” and that the show is both “rambunctious and delightfully, kinetically familiar.” This production, directed by Chloe Claudel, includes several of the best dance breaks in town (choreographed by Lena Engelstein), so even though Yoo’s dissociating 16-year-old character yearns for the passionless limbo of the Sims, the show itself generates terabytes of emotion.
Through July 11 at the Greenwich House Theater, Manhattan. Read the original review.
‘Camping’
We’re in the heyday of dramas about girls emoting in their pajamas, and now we have the form’s most feverishly repressed exponent: Victoria Lynne Barclay’s time-skipping romance, directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt for Colt Coeur. It’s ultra-intimate. The entire micro-set (designed by Krit Robinson) is the interior of a tent, where two friends, Brit (Alice Kremelberg) and Ari (Colby Minifie), experience erotic milestones together. Across the years, they lose their virginity (to the same guy), fight about college, gaze longingly at each other and deny their love again and again. After an hour of scream-into-your-sleeping-bag tension, the velocity slackens, but the actors, both absolutely excellent, maintain their staggering connection. The little tent shakes with wind and rain. The key element, though, is gravity — the attraction between two bodies. HELEN SHAW
Through July 11 at Here Arts Center, Manhattan.
‘Henry VI: A Trilogy in Two Parts’
The National Asian American Theater Company’s ambitious project of abridging Shakespeare’s three ‘Henry VI’ plays — cramming all of the Wars of the Roses into two nights of theater — returns to the stage, after nearly eight years. In 2018, Laura Collins-Hughes described this stylized production as “fast-paced and gripping” and “an unusually lucid staging of a bloody history play, whose surfeit of schemes and villainy could make a daytime-drama writer blush.” Now at the Public Theater, the chronicle is again directed by Stephen Brown-Fried, who emphasizes the era’s seemingly endless military reversals in his breathless, one-battle-after-another adaptation. For those willing to brave the fray, NAATCO’s revival offers several startling performances: Teresa Avia Lim as the fierce Margaret of Anjou, ignoring her own tears as she tortures a bleeding enemy; Myka Cue as a terrific Joan of Arc; and the astounding Julyana Soelistyo playing Gloucester, a conniving aristocrat who will one day grow into the monstrous Richard III.
Through July 19 at the Public Theater, Manhattan. Read the original review.
‘Music City’
Peter Zinn’s jukebox musical uses a host of boisterous country tunes and ballads by JT Harding — some songs are repurposed; some songs are new for the show — so it’s often just as rowdy as the director Eric Tucker’s immersive staging can make it. The audience members sit at tables in the Wicked Tickle, an East Nashville joint that has been created, sawdust and all, in a Midtown basement theater; characters meet through the bar’s open-mic night, where (broke) new talent hopes to be discovered. Elisabeth Vincentelli described the show’s 2024 run at the West End Theater as “a rollicking good time that understands contemporary country music — the style and the lifestyle — in a way we don’t often see on New York theater stages.” Lauren Pritchard recently joined the cast as a heartsore singer-songwriter; Pritchard was Ilse in Broadway’s “Spring Awakening” and has released several bluesy albums as Lolo.
At St. Luke’s Theater, Manhattan. Read the original review.
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