Off-Off Broadway shows in NYC

Tom and Betsy Salamon’s unique adventure—part interactive theater, part scavenger hunt, part walking tour—draws participants into an amusing web of puzzles and intrigue. You can choose between the three-hour New York tour, which takes participants through various neighborhoods of lower Manhattan, or the two-hour Village tour, which travels through quirky Greenwich Village on Saturdays. Groups of as many as 11 are booked every half hour. 

A young man with Asperger's syndrome returns from a mysterious absence in Catya McMullen's drama about the difficulty of understanding one another. Jenna Worsham directs the NYC premiere for Lesser America.

A drunken poet stumbles through the streets of Moscow, trying to catch a train to a suburban utopia, in this antinaturalistic stage version of Venedikt Yerofeyev's satirical postmodern novel Moscow–Petrushki. The production is adapted and directed by Varda, a dissident Polish theatermaker turned New York restaurateur who is making his return to the creative world after a long absence.

In a wake of Michael Brown's death in 2014, Theater of War Productions mounts an ambitious free production of the original political protest play: Sophocles' tale of a Theban woman who, unhappy with the city's ignoble treatment of her dead brother, is confined to a cave by a tyrant who feels she protests too much. Directed and adapted by Bryan Doerries, the piece combines readings from the play by a rotating cast of actors—incuding Samira Wiley, Paul Giamatti, Chris Noth, Tamara Tunie, David Strathairn, Adepero Oduye, Frankie Faison and Kathryn Erbe—with choral music performed by activists, police officers and citizens of New York City and Ferguson, Missouri. Panels and group discussions follow each performance. 

Douglas Lackey's biographical play dives into the unlikely romance and long-term friendship shared by philosopher and Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger and Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt. Alexander Harrington directs a cast of five.

Kevin Doyle's docudrama, codirected by Mike Carlsen, looks back on more than a half-century of debates about public funding of the arts in America, including the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1960s and the culture wars over controversial artists in the early 1990s. Doyle's Brooklyn-based company is called, aptly enough, Sponsored by Nobody.

After more than 15 years at the Waldorf Astoria, Steve Cohen, billed as the Millionaires’ Magician, now conjures his high-class parlor magic in the marble-columned Madison Room at the swank Lotte New York Palace. Audiences must dress to be impressed (cocktail attire is required); tickets start at $100, with an option to pay more for meet-and-greet time and extra tricks with Cohen after the show. But if you've come to see a classic-style magic act, you get what you pay for. Sporting a tuxedo and bright rust hair, the magician delivers routines that he has buffed to a patent-leather gleam: In addition to his signature act—"Think-a-Drink," involving a kettle that pours liquids by request—highlights include a lulu of levitation trick and a card-trick finale that leaves you feeling like, well, a million bucks.

The cruelty of a totalitarian Latin American regime bleeds into the home life of an army officer in this 1985 drama by the pathbreaking Cuban-American playwright María Irene Fornés. Elena Araoz directs the revival for Boundless Theatre Company.

In this darkly comic but hard-edged solo show, Hope Salas plays three women: a 1950s prostitute, a troubled wife and mother, and a storyteller struggling to piece her life together. Erika Latta directs the world premiere.

Choreographer and stunt provocateur Gunna Montana unleashes a hyper-saturated dungeon demimonde on the La Mama stage. Watch as a crew of queer underground superheroes strip, strut and surrender to their carnal urges in this neon-splattered nightclub fantasy.