Off-Off Broadway shows in NYC

Founded in 2006 by experimentalist guru Mac Wellman, this off-kilter minifest features work by playwrights who were recently in Brooklyn College's M.F.A. program. This year, individual sci-fi plays by Ann Marie Dorr, Andrew Hardigg, Claire Greising and Kurt Chiang have been combined into a single omnibus saga directed by Hanna Yurfest and titled The Booming Voice of No One: A Mutant Anthology of Plays on Science Fiction from Brooklyn College.

The CUNY Graduate Center's Martin E. Segal Theatre Center goes wide with a new annual festival of free alfresco performances by artists from around the world. The French tightrope artist Tatiana Mosio-Bongonga walks the line, and the Senagalese circus troupe Compagnie SenCirk presents separate indoor and outdoor programs; Quebec's Le Cirque Kikasse performs acrobatic and balancing acts on a tricked out food truck. Two groups up the cool factor with actual frozen water: France's Théâtre de l’Entrouvert shares a choreographic project involving feet made of melting ice, whereas performers from the U.K. troupe Kaleider try to construct an arch out of ice and concrete. Italy's Parini Secondo uses jump rope as percussion for a dance piece, and France's Théâtre de la Ville teams up with the Down to Earth team to offer multilingual one-on-one "poetic consultations" in three boroughs. Meanwhile, the Segal Center offers—as a "festival-within-a festival"—a new edition of its annual Prelude series, an unmissable showcase for upcoming avant-garde work that offers the theater and dance equivalent of a coming-attractions sampler. This year's Preludes is devoted to site-specific work by artists from Cuba, France, Iran, Ivory Coast, Brazil and Ukraine in addition to those from the U.S. Check out the festival's website for a full schedule of events and locations. 

The lucky 13th edition of TNC's diverse fest, curated by literary manager Michael Scott-Price, features 22 works, nearly all of which nearly are world or U.S. premieres. Outer space is a theme in at least three: Fletcher Michael's First Liar on the Moon imagines the lives of the actors who played astronauts in a fake lunar landing; Thomas M. Copeland's One in Twenty-Five looks at the aftermath of the Challenger explosion; and Blake Du Bois and TJ Canlon's Dune! The Dunesical (The Unauthorized 4D “Muad’Dib” Experience) - Part 1 is a musical send-up of Frank Herbert's sandwormy saga. Among the more down-to-earth offerings are Sloan Aulgur's Green Herrings in a Yellow Room: A Counter Production of The Yellow Wallpaper, a deconstruction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's famous short story, and Steven Sarao's The Boys From Kingsbridge, about a pair of Bronx buddies who grow up to be cops. Solo shows include Elizabeth Alice Murray's Con*Cussed, about recovering from a head injury; Rodolfo Avarado's Undesirable Secrets, about a Mexican-American P.O.W. who spent time in a Nazi camp; and Steven and Rick Simone-Friedland's Kind Stranger…a memory play, adapted from Tennessee Williams's 1975 autobiography. Visit the Dream Up website for a full list of shows.

After more than a decade performing Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, an ever-changing collection of 30 two-minutes plays, the New York Neo-Futurists had to change course when piece's author pulled the rights abruptly in 2016. Now the troupe performs a different ever-changing collection of 30 two-minute plays called The Infinite Wrench. (We wrote about it here.) In 2025, the troupe moved from Manhattan to the recently established Williamsburg outpost of Chicago's legendary Second City improv-comedy factory.

Not many Shakespeare plays can be accurately described as underrated, but King John is one of them: the tragic history of Richard the Lionheart's much less lionized younger brother, an early English king of uncertain morals who squares off against France, the Pope and a wildly popular pretender to the throne. John Gordon directs a rare staging of the play for the fledgling Smoking Mirror Theatre Company, with Bellamy Woodside Ridinger in the title role. 

The sharp-minded actor, monologist and memoirist Iris Bahr (Dai) teams up with Frigid New York to create her own short but sweet festival: a four-day collection of cracked perspectives, each performed by their own actor-writers as solos or two-handers. Promising selections include Roya Hamadani's Manic! and Johnnie Mcnamara's the Heterosexuals. Bahr herself kicks off the proceedings on September 4 in a discussion with two very big-time writers: the dauntingly prolific editor-novelist Kurt Anderson and his onetime Spy magazine colleague, the New Yorker articles editor (and recent Lorne Michaels biographer) Susan Morrison. 

This extended riff on—and revision of—Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, written by Argentina's Romina Paula and translated by Jean Graham-Jones, ran a couple seasons ago at the teensy private townhouse venue Torn Page. It returns now at The Brick, directed once more by Tony Torn and featuring the entire original cast of four: Ben Becher, Ana B. Gabriel, Lucas Salvagno and Josefina Scaro. The performance are followed by talkback sessions with a different artist each time.