The best Off-Off Broadway shows in NYC

The Drilling Company begins its annual summer season of Shakespeare in the Parking Lot with the Bard's problematic romantic comedy about an otherwise sensible woman who not only stands by the cad who spurns her but tracks him halfway across Europe. Karla Hendrick directs the Lower East Side series' first attempt at staging this prickly piece in its 22-year history.

Erin Courtney and Mac Wellman, estimable experimentalists both, oversee this off-kilter minifest of work by playwrights in Brooklyn College's M.F.A. program. Four new plays are presented in two programs, offered in rep. Tickets are free but reservations are required.

The Night Shift, which describes itself as a “working class theater” group, hosts this inebriated monthly reading of Shakespearean monologues. Want to see if you can recite Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” after a few brews? Step up to the mike, or just sit back and soak in the iambs.

This annual festival celebrates those vigorous American salmon preparing to swim into the shoals of the Edinburgh Fringe this year. Selections include Craig Lucas's Tales of Life and Death, Brian Parks's Enterprise, Peter Michael Marino's Show Up, Romy Nordlinger’s Places, Chris Davis's One-Man Apocalypse Now and a new musical adaptation (by Jennifer Jewell, Mark Cabus and Chris Tench) of Christina Rossetti's forbidden-fruit poem "Goblin Market."

All Out Arts presents its 15th annual LGBTQ arts fest, featuring short plays, full-length works and cabaret shows. Among the offerings are Doug DeVita's The Phillie Trilogy, about growing up gay in the 1970s; Charles Curtis's Strings, in which a white lawyer defends a black vigilante on Death Row; and Jessica and Jared Field's La Maupin, a musical about a bisexual 17th-century opera singer and swordswoman.

Red Lab Productions keeps Georgia on our minds with a festival of works by playwrights from the small Caucasian nation. Offerings include two full productions—Lasha Bugadze's Navigator in Love and Tamar Bartaia's A Toy Gun—as well as free readings and special events.

The restless heir to England's throne gets mixed up with a naughty crowd in Shakespeare's history play and coming-of-age story, directed by S.C. Lucier for the peripatetic Hip to Hip Theatre Company. Presented in rep with the company's take on Measure for Measure, the production never plays the same park twice, so check the Hip to Hip website for details.

Hudson Warehouse goes once more unto Riverside Park, my friends, with its final production of the summer: Shakespeare's stirring history play, in which an untested English king lays claim to a corner of France's vasty fields. Nicholas Martin-Smith directs.

The Drilling Company's Hamilton Clancy directs the rarely seen third section of Shakespeare's Henry VI triology, about a particularly thorny patch of the War of the Roses. The production is the second and final one of the 2017 Shakespeare in the Parking Lot season.

Escape your humdrum black-and-white life for the many shades of gay at Dixon Place's estimable annual festival of all things same-sex. The centerpiece of the 2017 edition is To T, or Not to T, a solo show by Sri Lankan–American trans comedian D'Lo that explores his experiences with testosterone (Fri and Sat). Other standouts include Ilene Sameth's operatic primadonna drama Bandwith: the Ups & Downs of a Lesbian Diva (Tue 11); a screening of Laura Arten's profile of trans artist Toyen at the International Women Artist's Salon (Sat 15); panel talk Out and Onstage, featuring Mindy Raf, Siobahn Hotaling and Tiides Music (Mon 17); and puppet show Gerswhin Live: Frosted Flakes (July 26).

In the helter-skelter of summer theater festivals, the cool curatorial heads of Ice Factory always provide a welcome breeze. The 2017 lineup includes work by Steven Haworth, anecdota, Bess and George, Johnny Walsh and John Bair, the Anthropologists, Melissa Tien and Built for Collapse, plus a late-night $15 performance salon on Fridays. Pioneering American astronaut Sally Ride is the subject of anecdota’s A Footnote in History* (July 5–8); in Bess and George’s True Right (July 12–15), two women of color play George and Jeb Bush in a riff on Sam Shepard’s True West. Walsh and Bair's Tear a Root from the Earth (July 19–22) is a participatory rock concert that follows three generations of an Afghan family as it copes with foreign meddling; The Anthropologists Save the World! (July 26–29) ropes survivalists, war robots and Aldous Huxley into a comedic-nihilistic look at our ability to change the future.

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 an entirely different ever-changing collection of two-minute plays called The Infinite Wrench. Click here for our full write-up.

South Brooklyn Shakespeare presents an outdoor staging of Shakespeare's marquee tragedy, in which a nobleman and his wife descend into a nightmare of mental disquiet after planning their king's murder. Dee Byrd-Molnar directs a production that evokes a 1970s landscape of war-ravaged lands and acid-tripping witches.

New York Classical Theatre's Stephen Burdman directs an outdoor account of Shakespeare's nasty, brutish and short Scottish tragedy, about a regicidal lord and the wicked women who goad him on. The production plays in Battery Park until its final week, when it relocates to Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Hip to Hip Theatre Company moves from park to park with this staging of Shakespeare's rather creepy play about sin and sacrifice, directed by Owen Thompson and presented in rep with the company's take on Henry IV, Part 1. The production roams through multiple boroughs but never plays the same spot twice, so consult Hip to Hip's website for details.

The Fringe Festival is on hiatus this year, but the 18th annual edition of producer John Chatterton’s theatrical grab bag fills some of the gap with brief runs of 100 productions, including multiple solo shows and musical works. For an exhaustive list, visit MITF's website.

It’s a mad array of swords through necks, vanishing fingers and levitations at New York’s long-running magic show, which features a rotating cast of the city’s best illusionists and prestidigitators. For a full schedule, visit the MNM website.

Queens Theatre assembles 10 playwrights, 11 actors and five directors for an anthology of short works set in Flushing Meadows Corona Park.

The scrappy Piper Theatre moves the action from Australia to modern-day Arizona in a free outdoor production of the campy 2011 Broadway musical, the tale of three fishy-out-of-water drag queens on a road trip through culturally hostile terrain. John P. McEneny directs.

Student ensembles from all five boroughs converge at the Vineyard for a two-week festival that celebrates and encourages their young voices. Participants hone their skills in workshops during the day and perform original works in the evening.

Eugène Ionesco's 1959 absurdist classic concerns ordinary citizens inexplicably transformed into horned beasts. The Rhinoceros Collective's free version, adapted by Wesley Savick and directed by Nate Speare, takes the herd outdoors at Astoria Park and features life-size pachydermal puppets.

Comic juggler Monroe, who won the 2012 Andy Kaufman Award, performs a one-man show cowritten by Josh Koenigsberg (Orange is the New Black).

Theater review by Helen Shaw When you walk into Say Something Bunny!, you enter another time. You might not notice that at first, because the brick office space where it takes place is so determinedly ordinary-looking. The small audience sits around a doughnut-shaped conference table, and as Alison S.M. Kobayashi begins her multimedia docuplay, some spectators are already paging through the scripts that have been placed in front of each chair. The text turns out to be the full transcript of a real, unlabeled 65-year-old recording that Kobayashi found hidden in an antique wire recorder: the audio relic of a teenage boy in Woodmere, Queens, enthusiastically taping two dozen family members and neighbors. Kobayashi has listened to the recording hundreds of times and has a seemingly boundless interest in the people whose voices it preserves, including amateur recordist David, mother Juliette and neighbor Bunny. She conducts us through a pair of after-dinner conversations, the first in 1952—she deduced the date from song lyrics mentioned on the wire—and the second in 1954. Aided by coauthor Christopher Allen, she pursues hints and half-heard jokes to determine who these people were and what befell them; she shows us the census records she used to find their old houses. The play unspools unhurriedly, leaving space for Kobayashi to make jokes, play short films and highlight points of historical interest. It takes a while for it to sink in that—of course—many of these vibrant people

The Riant Theatre offers a new crop of one-acts in the 30th edition of its now biannual festival, which doubles as a short-play competition whose finalists are chosen by audience vote. (Though the quality is highly uneven, admission is pricey by Off-Off Broadway festival standards, squeezing audiences that show up to support their friends.)

The Drilling Company wraps up its Bryant Park summer with Shakespeare's late romance, a jigsaw-puzzle drama whose pieces include a sorcerer’s revenge, young lovers, a shipwreck, a monster, a fairy slave and two regicide plots. The production includes songs by Natalie Smith and Andrew Gombas.

Hudson Warehouse reprises its 2013 production of Alexandre Dumas's swashbuckling 1844 novel, adapted by Susane Lee and directed by Nicholas Martin-Smith. The play is the first installment of the Dumas Adventures, a four-year project that is slated to include future productions of The Man in The Iron Mask and The Count of Monte Cristo.

The Brick presents the sophomore edition of its festival of theater works chosen by and featuring the work of transgender artists. The lineup includes 16 pieces, running for one to three performances each.

The Drilling Company's Bryant Park residency continues with a single weekend of Shakespeare’s sparkling comedy about identical twins, cross-dressing and cross-gartered socks.