Staff Picks No. 120
Star & Stan, Laurel Atwell, Alex Tatarsky, BABAS : Star & Stan, Laurel Atwell, Alex Tatarsky, BABAS, Nola Sporn Smith
Stone Circle Theater
Wednesday November 5th 2025
This lineup is crazy!!!!!! Thank me later
Staffer: Leah Plante-Wiener
WHAT’S DONE, IN THE DARK… : DANIRO
CPR
Thursday October 23rd 2025
CPR artist-in-residence DANIRO presents a three-part performance exploring the “desires, emotions, and imaginations of a woman of the night.” Promotional imagery includes chains, leather, and subs bound to the wall. Multihyphenate DANIRO’s practice heavily involves electronic music, and that combined with the above is impossibly enticing to me. Tickets are sold out, but there’s a waitlist!
Staffer: Leah Plante-Wiener
SERIALS : Amalia Oliva Rojas, Cody Hom, Georgia Wright, Jack Ventimilia, AJ Ditty, Michael Ortiz, Emanuel Brielle Simpson, Nicholas Turturro, Kristan Seemel
The Tank
October 23rd-25th 2025 (and more in Nov and Dec)
A cornerstone of The Tank’s programming, SERIALS rents out a very special part of my heart. This late-night competition between fast-and-hard-written episodic plays is a home for big swings, wild choices, and oftentimes revelatory comedic performances. Part of what also makes SERIALS so special is the community— you’ll leave your first show feeling like you’ve been friends with these people all along. And they have a website now!
Staffer: Leah Plante-Wiener
Practice : Nazareth Hassan, Keenan Tyler Oliphant, Afsoon Pajoufar, Karen Boyer, Tei Blow, Brenda Abbandandolo, Masha Tsimring, Camden Gonzales, Rocío Mendez, Genevieve Ortiz, Opa Adeyemo, Maya Margarita, Karina Curet, Ronald Peet, Amandla Jahava, Susannah Perkins, Mark Junek, Omar Shafiuzzaman, Hayward Leach, Alex Wyse
Playwrights Horizons
October 30th-December 7th 2025
I loved BOWL EP, Hassan’s cosmos-meets-skatepark-meet/cute, and I am equally as excited for what seems to be another ambitious, possibly mind-melding work a few stops uptown at Playwrights Horizons. I kinda love when artists rip into each other with absolute truth, but it comes from love, right? A genuine, messed up kind of love for what we do and what brings us there. And an S-tier cast & design team.
Staffer: Reuven Glezer
Certain Death And Other Considerations : Eliza Frakes, Emma Pierce Rempel
The Tank
November 8th-10th 2025
Eliza Frakes is in town for a limited time only, getter while she's HOT AND HERE! This is a new play "by the climate anxious, for the climate anxious." Light stuff! But knowing Eliza, there is some sneaky work at play, and humor, and maybe even hope (???) not in our world, but how we treat each other.
Staffer: Billy McEntee
Wilder Maker Record Release Shows : Wilder Maker, Nora Stanley
The Owl Music Parlor
October 23rd-December 29th 2025
Across two nights, at the Owl Music Parlor, Brooklyn’s Wilder Maker celebrate the release of their first LP in three years, “The Streets Like Beds Still Warm", a folk-ish, lo-fi, free jazz record of glimpses and refractions. These are lullabies for those still awake far too late; often tender, but with a woozy tension and darkness. At both shows, the band will be improvising extended variations on the album’s songs, and the Owl is the perfect intimate space for these twilit vignettes. Nora Stanley opens. Come through!
Staffer: Joshua Dumas
The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella : Carolina Bianchi
Powerhouse Arts
October 23rd-25th 2025
In order illustrate her ideas on sexual violence (both her own and historically), creator Carolina Bianchi takes an actual tranquilizer early in the performance. From there, things get pretty dark and messy (I've read) as an ensemble manipulates her body and Bianchi's act of remembering continues. This show had a lot of coverage and discourse when it premiered in 2023, so I'd recommend researching a little if you're unsure about attending.
Staffer: Travis Amiel
PENCILS PENCILS PENCILS : Pencils of Color, Ena Da, Grace Johnson, Amber Singletary
Isola Brooklyn
Thursday October 30th 2025
Pencils of Color is responsible for my favourite short-form sketch series: Amish Girls taking New York, featuring episodes such as Amish Girls Find Love in Brooklyn, Amish Girls Smoke Weed for the First Time, and Amish Girls Collab with Local Brooklyn Rapper. Take a scroll through @pencilsofcolor_ to see what POC is all about (Connor & Aster 4ever), then get your tickets to PENCILS PENCILS PENCILS, their live Halloween show!
Staffer: Leah Plante-Wiener
You Never Learn : William Sydney, Forest Entsminger, Karen Boyer, Jacqueline Scaletta, Robin Margolis, Grady Shea, Sam Kersnick, Leigh Honigman, Small Boat Productions (Ben Natan & AJ Liu), Gary De Mattei, Abe Goldfarb, Jeffrey Marchetti, Randolph Curtis Rand
Target Margin
November 6th-22nd 2025
When William Sydney told me he was working on a Jane Austen adaptation, I was like…what? But this is from a very evil writer with a deep interest in form and audience…reaction? Emotional viscera? So this won’t be your grandma’s community theatre production of Jane Austen’s EMMA. This will be something that will require a newfound regular dose of Zoloft, probably.
Staffer: Reuven Glezer
I cannot see everything, now that I am mostly in KS (for now), but I really pack it in when I visit. And, of course, I am going to William Sydney’s newest show. I expect to be challenged. I expect to question myself and reality and art. I expect to experience something I have yet to experience, which is the greatest hope I can have for an expectation and the highest praise I can give to acts of theater.
Staffer: Theresa Buchheister
LACRIMA : Caroline Guiela Nguyen
BAM
October 22nd-26th 2025
One of my big BAM Next Wave picks, a very brief run to get the rare chance to see a Caroline Guiela Nguyen work. It’s expansive, imaginative, political - a full-bodied play about the labor it takes to cater to the Western bourgeois, about the people behind that labor, from one of Europe’s great theatrical talents. A very brief run, so waste not this chance!
Staffer: Reuven Glezer
Good News, or Harry the Dog (The Modest Mouse Show) : Salty Brine, Shaun Peknic, Jeff Cubeta, Tracy Bersley, Lizzie Hagstedt, Tristan Marzeski, Rob Mosher, Christopher Bowser, Kate Fry, Renee Blinkwolt, Devin McCallion Fletcher, & Lucy Jackson
Joe’s Pub
October 23rd-25th 2025
That's right, the Living Record Collection is BACK, bitches, and this time to Modest Mouse's Good News For People Who Love Bad News - I'm a big fan of Salty Brine's continued musical extravaganzas with albums enjoyed by aggravating college students of a certain age (I was one of them, don't @ me). Get Briny with it!
Staffer: Reuven Glezer