LEAH PLANTE-WIENER’S 2026 FESTIVAL DIARY
This festival season, I saw twenty-one shows. I also performed in a festival piece for the first time: Noah Latty’s Time Signatures, produced through Exponential. Yippee! A huge thank you to Travis Amiel’s yearly planner for making my January possible, and to the seventeen people on my shared notes app schedule for hanging out inside my phone.
Leah in the cold for theatre.
Saturday, January 3rd: I kick off both festival season and the new year at Life World with Ann Marie Dorr’s i’m going to take my pants off now (Exponential). Fog and flashlights are paired to tremendous effect. The moment that Dorr emerges in a comically large cod piece (not that kind of codpiece– I mean the fish), nothing but high-heeled legs sticking out, I am tickled in a place of delight somewhere deeper than words can find. The new Life World once again asserts itself as a versatile playground.
Monday, January 5th: I’m at Judson Church for the first time (!) in my seven and a half years in New York for the Out-FRONT! split bill of Suzzanne Ponomarenko and Dominica Greene. I’m especially moved by Greene’s playful crafting of intimacy with her audience, whom she invites via prerecorded audio to partake in a series of highly theatrical tasks. I volunteer to be guided through the space by her, which requires me to close my eyes and let her manipulate my body. I lean my weight against her; she leans her weight against me. We share a hug afterwards. In this moment of contact, the warmth in both her spirit and artistic ethos is unmistakable.
Tuesday, January 6th: I’m at Judson Church for the second time in my seven and a half years in New York, once again for Out-FRONT! This time, the split bill is shared between Alexa Grae and Sugar Vendil. Encountering Vendil’s work proves greatly exciting for me. Her particular fusion of live looping, music, ambient sound, text, and choreography reminds me of how grateful I am to have embraced a more multihyphenate approach to my work in recent years, especially by returning to my background in music. The piece, depicting Vendil’s early separation from her older brother, evokes both unbridled joy and profound melancholy in me. There’s a toy piano I fall in love with.
Friday, January 9th: Make my way to Target Margin for Normandy Sherwood and Nikki Calonge’s The Mushroom (Exponential). I am glad to find Sherwood’s meticulously transformed textiles for the first time since 2023’s Psychic Self Defense. The majority of the show’s spectacle is tucked into a room past the TMT offices, which makes for an aptly absurd journey from the show’s first half in the Doxsee. Nico Noreña partakes in some batshit face acting in this one, and to be honest, I could use a full hour of just that. When we leave the show, my mother–who has just seen Mario Banushi’s Mami–comments that everyone seems to be fixated on mothers this year.
Saturday, January 10th: First, a Brick Aux matinee of Kaye Hurley and Kedian Keohan’s :/secondplace (Exponential). I am forever in awe of lighting designer Jacqueline Scaletta’s ability to elevate the theatre spaces we know so well into the otherworldly. In a moment staged in the Aux’s micro-backyard, the actors’ mics catch the soft patter of rain falling on their umbrellas, gently underscoring their exchange. It’s small, it’s unintentional, but it’s tender, and it stays with me long after the fact.
At night, I go to Ann Liv Young’s apartment for a Sherry Post-Xmas Rave, and get yelled at for two hours.
Sunday, January 11th: An evening jaunt to New York Live Arts for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company’s Collage Revisited (1988, 2025) Story/ (2013) (Live Artery). My mother is also in attendance. As a very chic Montrealer, she is very into dance. The work is, of course, excellent. It’s invigorating to witness historically significant work brought to life by a new generation of talent trained by the greats. By the second half of the show, the ensemble beams with the distinct aura of performers who know that they’re killing it, and it’s far from unearned. I am electrified by witnessing the superhuman feats that great dancers can achieve. I bitterly observe that the entire audience has better posture than me.
Thursday, January 15th: Back to New York Live Arts for my second viewing of Lena Engelstein and Lisa Fagan’s Friday Night Rat Catchers (Under the Radar, Live Artery), which I am giddy to see again after its first run in the spring. I am an ardent Lena/Lisa disciple, and it’s nothing short of a treat to rediscover Lisa declaring that she is two and does not have a boyfriend, the rocks falling out of Lena’s trench coat, whatever the hell Marianne Rendón is doing in this, and, my god, those disco balls. Take us to the moon, ladies. This is the avant-garde. WHERE! ARE! MY! AIRPODS!
Friday, January 16th: At Performance Space New York for DARKMATTER (UTR), created by Cherish Menzo and performed with her collaborator Camilo Mejía Cortés. It’s an exceptional piece of work, an immense achievement from an artist who has carved her own audiovisual lexicon out of the Afrofuturist tradition. Menzo has an uncanny grip on the flow of time, the hypnotic quality a voice can slip into, all the small tensions and releases of the human body. I’m still haunted by this one; visions of its electric fog clouds and black-stained canvas sails regularly emerge from my subconscious. I’ll be the first to buy a ticket the next time Menzo’s in New York.
Saturday, January 17th: A three-show day in a two-show container! First, Miranda Brown and Noa Rui-Piin Weiss’s ¿¡¡simonnegs≈≈>:(:{{** paired with Maria Camia’s Maria Reads a Book: Higher Eyes on Aricama at JACK (Exponential), an excellently curated split bill of shows that share a similar cheekiness across disciplines. The former is pure fun, showmanship, and agility splintered by existential angst in the wake of artistic collaboration. I get to die onstage, which I am honoured to do for Miranda and Noa. The latter is a sensory wonderland of pop-up paintings, concealing reveal after reveal of bite-sized, handmade puppets. Both halves are a zany delight.
Then, it’s off to BAM for Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson’s remount of Richard Foreman’s What to Wear (Prototype). I enjoy myself, but conversations with former Foreman collaborators and interns recontextualize the performance for me. I get to thinking about how I’ll never experience a Foreman work actually directed by the man himself. (There is something to be said about the production crediting him as director, postmortem.) I feel an acute sense of loss at this realization; in terms of my artistic lineage, I’m a Foreman grandchild, but I’ll never know what it is to sit in one of his audiences and be caught in the throes of the psychic paralysis and ecstasy only he could evoke. This production is a fine recreation of the original piece, a gesture to Foreman’s legacy, but it isn’t him. Nonetheless, when a duck enters a fine restaurant…
Sunday, January 18th: The closing matinee of Narcissister’s Voyage into Infinity at Skirball (UTR). While Skirball offers the show a large scale and thorough technical capacity, I wonder if there’s a fundamental mismatch between material and venue. Between the concert hall quality of Skirball, the framing of the proscenium, and the sheer size of the place, the performance takes on an almost Vegas-like sheen, a too-shiny distancing from its viewers. Audience members applaud whenever a trick is executed, and it feels like we’re taping an episode of America’s Got Talent. I crave a greater inescapability from the slow, strange rhythms of Narcissister’s world; I long for a painful awareness of my own voyeurism. Basically, I want to see this at the Chocolate Factory.
Tuesday, January 20th: At the Public for the first time since GATZ in 2024, for another Elevator Repair Service show: Ulysses (UTR). I love the acceleration of theatrical hysteria throughout ERS projects, the accumulation of ludicrous props, the progressive reshuffling of a carefully ordered set. I love watching grown adults scramble onstage, as if the performance itself were trying to squeeze the life out of them. I love how the show tests my patience, just as the Joyce novel is wont to do. Maggie Hoffman is perfect, like in everything she does.
Wednesday, January 21st: Opening night of Nurit Chinn and Kedian Keohan’s Godbird (Exponential). I’ve never seen people waitlist and get turned away from The Brick like this. Correction: I’ve never seen people waitlist and get turned away from The Brick, like, ever. I’m won over pretty immediately by this one, which doesn’t happen all that much to me these days, with plays where people just… talk to each other. But Chinn is really, really good at that, and she’s crafted a play that is smart, sexy, genuinely funny, honest-to-god engaging, and immensely sensitive, but not without its fair share of bite. This is the kind of play that makes people claim that “theatre is so back.” Pete Simpson plays the best damn bird I’ve seen onstage, second only to the dodo from last year’s Dead as a Dodo.
Sunday, January 25th: Make a harrowing post-snowstorm trek to Loading Dock for the closing of Hannah Mitchell’s TRAD (Exponential), because I know and love a large majority of the people working on it. Mitchell transports us to the sinister, anesthetized world of a tradwife spending her days caring for her nine (?) invisible children, peddling beef tallow on Instagram, and getting disastrously horny over her husband, who loves to simply not be on the homestead. I get lost in the farmland with Mitchell–dreamily painted on canvas backdrop by scenic designer Jonathan Schatzberg–then sharply tugged back to reality by the pit in my stomach. In a moment of audience participation, I am briefly cast as the titular wife’s potential lesbian lover. We share a heated moment over a rose.
Monday, January 26th: Back to Target Margin for The Goat Exchange’s Time Passes (For Ellen Brody) (Exponential). Immediately, Forest Entsminger’s sparse set is a masterclass in statement pieces. A circling lighthouse-effect spotlight draws gasps from the crowd. Sunscreen is sprayed abundantly. Raw chicken is cracked open. The shark sharks. Chloe Claudel could read the phone book and I’d pay to listen. The Goat Exchange should stage Chloe Claudel reading a Dr. Bronner’s soap bottle. Overall, an ambient journey that lets the mind wander, but keeps the senses sharp. Also, we don’t talk nearly enough about the baby shark. He’s a fucking star.
Thursday, January 29th: I’ve truly bookended the season with shows at Life World. This time, it’s Amanda Horowitz’s Fashion (Exponential). I leave with three major takeaways, which are that 1) we have all had the same dating-app sexting situationships, 2) we should be trying to create swimming pools in theatre more often, and 3) downtown princess of our hearts Pete Simpson will never not be a scene-stealer.
Saturday, January 31st: My only actual three-show day of the season, and potentially my first one ever. I start at Brick Aux for a 2 pm matinee of Akane Little’s MOMMA! (Exponential), where Little dextrously sculpts an ambivalent, too-entwined mother-child relationship with not much more than a dress form mannequin and a cloth umbilical cord. This one hurts me big time, and I suffer a thousand small blows throughout. My pain is temporarily alleviated by my admiration for Little’s core strength. My love affair with butoh lives another day.
I hustle to the West Village for the 4 pm matinee of Dream Feed by HawtPlates, at HERE Arts (UTR). I immediately fall under HawtPlates’s spell, which, in my opinion, is woven only thicker by the charming clunks of HERE’s radiators. I think of how music allows for performers to convey how much they’re enjoying themselves, without restraint, and of how infectious that can be. I think of the ways in which other performance disciplines inhibit that transparency. I spend the whole show bopping along. My father is the first to rise for a standing O. I later learn that he’s never dreamed of his teeth falling out.
I end up in Red Hook for the 9 pm performance of Monica Mirabile and Mara McKevitt’s Paradise Container at Pioneer Works. Longtime personal icon Maya Martinez is a tug-at-your-heartstrings standout, shuffling her way through the piece’s immersive set in a narcotic fog. Also, Sigrid Lauren: WHO IS THIS DIVA? I spend much of the show pondering the burden of performances that embrace a Sleep No More-style roaming audience model.
Monday, February 2nd: I close out my festival season at The Brick with a play I already know and love: Hillary Gao’s I want to hold onto something beautiful and empty (Exponential), first produced as a Clubbed Thumb staged reading last summer. Gao is particularly gifted at a theatre of dissociation, and I’m always eager to find myself simultaneously drifting and engaged when witnessing their work. It’s a precarious balance that takes great skill and intention to strike correctly, and it’s one that I am constantly seeking to evoke within my own work. Here, Gao guides their audience through increasingly strange, dreamlike scenarios featuring a quad of bilingual office sirens, all eager Shein employees with a penchant for ASMR, who send out a single email per day. Hannah Bird’s costumes are unbearably chic. Go you to the happy hour lunch want you lunch to happy hour go you?