Off-Off Broadway shows in NYC

Theater review by Helen Shaw  When you enter the very intimate basement venue for Bleach, a fellow at the door signs you in. “Any trouble at all with being touched by the performer?” he asks, professionally, with his clipboard at the ready to note your likes and dislikes. Dan Ireland-Reeves’s play, a monodrama for a sex worker in mental disarray, doesn’t really have a problem with making you feel uncomfortable. It just wants to establish that all the unclothed proximity ahead is something you have chosen—and paid for.  Tyler (Brendan George) will do anything for enough cash. It says so on his business card! That’s how he affords the roomy studio apartment in which eight to ten of us at a time sit on couches and chairs, all pointed toward Tyler’s big, rumpled, rather lonely-looking bed. When Tyler emerges, naked and stretching like a cat, he’s already on the defensive. As he describes his coke-raddled passion for the hustler’s life, he lets slip little hints that all isn’t well. “I know what I did was wrong,” he says. And after many digressions and occasional audience cuddles, Tyler forces himself to admit to us (and to himself) that some of his rough play has gone very badly indeed. Ireland-Reeves’s play takes fewer risks than Tyler does. We’re missing some key part of Tyler’s fall down the morality slide; we learn that he’s suffered heartbreak, but the play asks us to believe a level of self-destruction and cruelty that simply doesn’t gibe with the faunlike performer in f

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.

Waterwell travels to various locations in the city with a free dramatic reenactment of real-life deportation proceedings, built from court-transcript texts assembled by Arian Moayed. The company's newly appointed artistic director, Lee Sunday Evans (Dance Nation), directs a cast that includes Kathleen Chalfant, Hanna Cheek and Ruthie Ann Miles. 

The Drama League presents the 31st edition of its annual minifestival, which provides a forum for rising young directors. This year's offering features new one-acts by Clare Barron, Sheila Callaghan, Dipika Guha and Callie Kimball.

Brooklyn's very own January theater fest returns for a fourth year at locations throughout the borough, including the Brick, Chez Bushwick, CPR, The Glove, Jack, Target Margin Theater, Triskelion and Vital Joint. Among the featured artists are Ikechukwu Ufomadu, Built for Collapse, David Perez, Title: Point, Meta-Phys Ed., Gracie Gardner, Woof Nova and Hannah Kallenbach. RECOMMENDED: An inside guide to the January theater festivals in 2019

Horse Trade presents its tenth annual festival showcasing early-career African-American playwrights. The centerpiece is a $25 collection of 10-minute plays by eight writers: Kendra Augustin, Francisca Da Silveira, Adrienne Dawes, Samantha Godfrey, Garlia Cornelia Jones, Bernard Tarver, York Walker and Kezia Waters. The lineup also includes one-night readings of full-length plays for just $5 each.

Adapter-director H. Clark Kee reimagines Shakespeare's King Lear from the perspective of the play's wry jester (played here by a woman) in a 90-minute tragedy that uses text from the Bard's original.

Since 1992, Ping Chong + Company's series Undesirable Elements has used interview-based theater to draw attention to marginalized communities and individuals. In this show, written and directed by Sara Zatz and Kirya Traber in collaboration with seven performers, young New York City denizens from multiple ethnic backgrounds share stories of their pasts and futures.

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.