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 annual summer showcase for new work returns with a slate of new works, each performed three to five times. Remaining offering include Glory Kadigan's Double-Crossed, a thriller set o a cruise ship; Alicia Foxworth's Ghost Writer, a historical drama about human trafficking in antebellum New York; T.J. Elliott's Retrospective, in which an artist finds himself in a supernatural limbo; and the musical Beyond Perfection (by Kenady Sean, Emily Horton and Kaylee Killingsworth), a tale of rebellion against the romantic algorithms and social controls of a dystopian future. 

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.

Last year, NoHo's Gene Frankel Theatre, one of the city's oldest Off-Off venues—it was founded in 1949—came under the new ownership of Onomatopoeia Theatre Company's Thomas R. Gordon. Among Gordon's innovations at the space is this new August festival of 25 original one-act and short plays, which he has selected from more than 100 submissions. The shows are divided into eight blocks; the wrap-up event on August 17 will include awards for the festival's best acting, writing and directing. 

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.

In Omar Bakry's three-person drama, Inji El Gammal stars as a Middle Eastern woman in rural Ohio who is torn between her loyalty to her PTSD-addled American adoptive father and the possibilies unlocked by an enigmatic and attractive visitor from Egypt. Vincent Scott directs; Khaled Abol Naga and Roger Hendricks Simon complete the cast.

Mark Blane performs his own solo modernization of the ancient Greek myth of Medea, the mother of all infanticides, reimagining the main character as a film actress in modern-day New York whose career is upended by scandal. Dante Fuoco directs the multimedia production, which is performed weekly at spit&vigor's eensy-weensy West Village theater space. (Tickets are priced on a sliding scale based on what you can afford.)

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 Tank squeezes more than 60 productions into a three-week festival of work by emerging artists who are female, nonbinary or gender-nonconfirming. The centerpiece is a full production of Lili / Darwin, a poetic solo work by the Brazilian writer-performer Darwin Del Fabro—returning to the stage after a gender transition—that explores parallels between her experience and that of Lili Elbe, the Danish painter and sex-change pioneer portrayed by Eddie Redmayne in the 2015 biopic The Danish Girl. Lead Tank girl Meghan Finn directs. The other shows in the festival are performed only once; visit Visit the Tank's website for full information about them.