Off-Off Broadway shows in NYC

Writer-performer Jessica Sherr raises a cup to Davis in a solo tribute to the silver-screen legend that is set on the night of the 1939 Academy Awards. Karen Carpenter directs this interation of the show, which Sherr has been performing for more than a decade.

Theater review by Helen Shaw [Note: This is a review of the 2019 production of Lunch Box in Clubbed Thumb's Summerworks Festival. The show now returns for a full production, courtesy of the Play Company, with original cast members Ugo Chukwu and Julia Sirna-Frest now joined by Janice Amaya, Tala Ashe, David Greenspan, Louisa Jacobson, Francis Mateo and Jo Mei.] Hey, here’s a dare! Try seeing Lunch Bunch, Sarah Einspanier’s excellent workplace comedy, when you’re hungry. Its characters are overtaxed public defenders (the script suggests they might be in the Bronx), and their lone joy is a co-op lunch agreement shared by five proud members. In rattling, lickety-split dialogue, the lawyers tell us about the sustainable homemade delicacies—like sesame-encrusted kale chips and jackfruit barbecue—that they bring in to share with fellow Bunchers. (My notes here read: “Buy jackfruit.”) Membership in the Lunch Bunch is jealously guarded, so when rookie cook Nicole (Julia Sirna-Frest) subs in for a vacationing Tal (Eliza Bent), we have the whisper of plot. But there’s little room for a story, because Einspanier has crammed every second with marvelous character studies and syncopated conversations that reveal the topsy-turvy stakes of a life lived in service. Everybody in the office is tightly wound: Jacob (Ugo Chukwu) is one bad salad away from a breakdown, and Tuttle (comic superwoman Keilly McQuail) keeps wondering if her misery means she’s making a difference. Behind its giddy surre

David Herskovits and his brainy Target Margin Theater mount an intimate version of one of Shakespeare's strangest plays: a kind of Ancient Mediterranean Flash Gordon adventure—often co-attributed to Elizabethan ne'er-do-well George Wilkins—that includes shipwrecks, contests to win a princess’s hand, a pirate abduction, a virgin in a brothel and a guest shot by the goddess Diana. Eunice Wong plays the title role, and six other actors fill out the dramatis personae. 

Writer-performer Celeste Lecesne, who wrote the Oscar-winning gay-kid short Trevor under the former name James Lecesne, waxes lyrical about fairies—both legendary and real—in a solo show that offers spiritual strategies for survival in an inhospitable world. Kevin Hourigan directs this workshop production at Dixon Place. 

Henry James's poignant 1880 novella about a wealthy young lady, her coldhearted father and a fortune-hunting suitor was the basis of the 1947 hit The Heiress. Now Randy Sharp directs her own new adaptation of the story, which aims to strip away the period trappings to focus on its heroine's inner life. The production is returning for an encore after a well-received run last year.