The Brooklyn Rail

Ava Lalezarzadeh was a senior at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television when she got her hands on the script that would irrevocably change the course of her career.

Sayings don’t translate cleanly across languages. From Mongolian, an expression for love translates to “their heart is as white as milk and their hands as intricate as a key.”

Together, Jerry Lieblich and Paul Lazar explore the intersections of theater, politics, power, performance, and language in the bright, acerbically witty and linguistically acrobatic play The Barbarians, coming to La MaMa February 14–March 2, 2025.

Following the Broadway hit Grand Horizons and such off-Broadway successes as Small Mouth Sounds and Make Believe, any new work from Bess Wohl is greeted with much anticipation. The Brooklyn Rail spoke to Wohl about her inspiration for her newest work, Liberation, her reasons for collaborating with Whitney White, why she writes so well for actors, and the challenges of writing for off-Broadway.

Longtime collaborators Nile Harris and Malcolm-x Betts have amassed a following for their sensationalist performances on stage and online: they love to keep us questioning the afterlife of live performance while never quite pronouncing the show to be over. In Temporary Boyfriend, they suspend the audience in a fever dream of fickle relationality as they embody lovers, enemies, and friends on stage, loosely inspired by the intimacies of their real-life connection.

A bright windowsill:
The sun beats down 
Through the triple-pane
Onto a caked surface, where
White paint grows soft
And chips 
All year.

Amando Houser is starring as and in DeliaDelia! The Flat-Chested Witch!, their solo show intimately at home at the Brick Theater through December 14..

The Connelly was the planned home for Kallan Dana’s Racecar Racecar Racecar, but the venue’s landlord, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, had abruptly begun to scrutinize the work taking place on the Connelly’s stages. After the church quashed a planned production of Becoming Eve, a play centered around a transgender woman, multiple productions collapsed, and Josh Luxenberg, the venue’s director and general manager, resigned in protest.

In We Are Your Robots, creator and performer Ethan Lipton, performing as a robot who looks and sounds a whole lot like creator and performer Ethan Lipton, shares, from his digitized well of encyclopedic knowledge, that his favorite word is mencolek.

Dominique Morisseau’s works feature richly drawn characters, offering piercing and nuanced looks into everyone from blue collar laborers (Skeleton Crew) to international stars (Ain’t Too Proud—The Life and Times of the Temptations).

Marla Mindelle’s mother was sure she knew me from somewhere. It was just before a preview performance at the Orpheum Theatre of The Big Gay Jamboree, the new off-Broadway musical for which Mindelle serves as co-composer, co-lyricist, co-book writer, and star.

There’s an increasingly antiquated term for gay people who don’t have sex: a non-practicing homosexual. Increased LGBTQ+ acceptance has made the term something of a relic, however its spirit endures in the career of openly gay star Jim Parsons. The characters Parsons has played, on stage and screen, reflect larger questions about which ones audiences can expect to have sex—and, sometimes, how fully human they are allowed to be.

On The Rocks Theatre Co. is currently premiering their years-in-the-making play The Beastiary with Ars Nova at Greenwich House in the West Village. A frequent collaborator with the company, I sat down with creatives Dakota Rose and Christopher Ford just before rehearsals began this fall to talk about the inspiration behind their Boschian spectacle and their unusual collaborative process.

“It's important to remember that the Starr wasn't always the supernova it is today; it was once just a little baby Starr,” said Howze. “New York is in need of more baby Starrs. For the future of our art form, we need more gutsy young folks who are eager to band together. We need the folks at the Starr, who will no doubt inspire the next generation of brazen, unhinged art spaces.”

Nonprofits rarely exist without donors. These gift-givers do more than keep the lights on—they finance critical changes. But not all of them easily open their wallets. After over a decade fundraising for the ACLU, Matthew Freeman is well aware of this reality.

There was a point, circa 2015, when I was reading a ton of plays. I was, honestly, annoyed and unimpressed by almost everything—but there were two playwrights, Annie Baker and Mike Bartlett, who seemed to come up with a completely new, completely intact, and thrillingly rich theory of theater.

Ian Reid’s charming, gently-pitched comedy, Heaven is a place in the sky, which completed its week-long run directed by Jake Beckhard at The Tank on September 8, is not the first play to dig into how the economics of caregiving impact the minutiae of relationships.