A guide to NYC's January theater festivals in 2024

Brooklyn's very own January theater fest returns at locations throughout the borough, including the Brick, the Brick Aux, Jack, Target Margin Theater, Loading Dock Theatre, Cloud City and We Are Here. Shows with very long titles are very much in vogue this year; among those to look out for are Banana Bag & Bodice's Hubris Always Gets You in the End, Cristina Pitter's ixchel (we are still here, remember this medicine), Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams's Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods, Yuki Kawahisa's ten dreams of metamorphoses or me talk dirty someday and Marissa Joyce Stamps's Being Up in Here and All the Other Businesses that Don't Concern You OR When You See a Buncha Black People Running, What Do You Do? 

Once devoted to extending the runs of shows from the late and lamented New York International Fringe Festival, SoHo Playhouse's annual series has now expanded its purview to encompass productions from Fringe Festivals around the world—including, this year, the U.S. premieres of shows from Scotland, England, Australia, Czechia and Italy. The 2024 roster includes Sophie Swithinbank's masculinity study Bacon (through January 28), Jiggs Burgess's vicious queer two-hander Wounded (Jan 24–Feb 11) and Ted Lasso star Brendan Hunt's solo show The Movement You Need (Feb 7–10), as well as FlawBored's It’s a Motherf**king Pleasure, Cassie Workman's Aberdeen, Kenneth Uphopho Esther’s Revenge, JD Henshaw's Jekyll & Hyde, Blake Anderson's lip-synched Split Lip and Sabino Barbieri and Nuria Argiles's dance piece Uroboros/Akmé. Visit the SoHo Playhouse website for details.

Prototype Festival, the leading creator of new opera and music theater, is back for its 11th edition and this year's line-up is packed with powerhouse performances, including world premieres Terce: A Practical Breviary by Heather Christian; Adoration by Mary Kouyoumdjian and Royce Vavrek; and Malinxe by Laura Ortman and Autumn Chacon. The festival also includes the US premiere of The Promise, a co-creation by internationally acclaimed Dutch singer-songwriter Wende, with the Royal Court Theatre and renowned English composer Isobel Waller-Bridge.

This top-notch annual festival of new works from around the world, curated by Mark Russell, was all but declared dead when it was cut loose last year by its longtime partner, the Public Theater. Instead, it has survived as a citywide effort at venues throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. Remaining offerings at this year's edition include Sister Sylvester's The Eagle and the Tortoise, Tania El Khoury's Cultural Exchange Rate, Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey's Open Mic Night, Dynasty Handbag's Titanic Depression and Luke Murphy's Volcano—along with Arlekin Players Theatre's Our Class, Krymov Lab NYC's Eugene Onegin: In Our Own Words and Shayok Misha Chowdhury's Public Obscenities, whose runs extend beyond the festival's end on January 21. Visit the UTR website for full details.