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What does A stand for? That question hangs over the protagonist—referred to only as A in the script—of Marin Ireland's deeply personal play Pre-Existing Condition. Her ex-boyfriend hit her so hard that she ended up on the floor, and although she didn't seek medical attention, the incident left her with emotional and psychological scars and split her life into before and after. Everyone wants to know what A wants now: Money? Justice? Revenge on her abuser? The problem is, she’s not sure she knows. If A’s intense, halting, often uncomfortable exchanges with the people in her life—a dismissive lawyer, her no-nonsense therapist, her support-group facilitators, her dates, her friends, her self-involved mother—sound unsettlingly authentic, that's because Ireland, a highly acclaimed stage actor, is writing from firsthand experience. But Pre-Existing Condition isn’t just a memoir à clef. Delicately directed by Maria Dizzia, the play offers a deep dive into the messy aftermath of domestic violence. Unlike many stories about abuse, it’s not about escaping or standing up; it's about navigating an inadequate system while trying to process what happened. (The difficulty of doing so is reflected by the fact that Ireland has been working on this play for 14 years.) Pre-Existing Condition | Photograph: Courtesy Jessica Kourkounis In a poignant illustration of how abuse can happen to anyone—A’s group leader says that one in three women is battered in her lifetime—six different actors are...

Demimonde demigod Joey Arias and puppet master Basil Twist return to HERE—and to outer space, a jungle garden, the underworld and a 1930s nightclub"—in a reprise their trippy 2008 pageant, originally reviewed below. The production is as fabulously overstuffed as ever, and if Arias is a little creakier in body and in voice, that feels perfectly in tune with the show's combination of the nostalgic and the outré.—Adam Feldman  Theater review by Elisabeth Vincentelli In 1950s science-fiction paperbacks, a resourceful hero could save the galaxy by improvising a super-potent weapon with a tin can, an elastic band and an old battery. In their new collaboration Arias with a Twist, performer Joey Arias and puppeteer Basil Twist essentially pull off the same trick: They’ve hatched a completely delirious revue halfway between Busby Berkeley and Pee-wee’s Playhouse out of felt and strings, a handful of songs, and a lot of loose screws. Arias with a Twist | Photograph: Courtesy Richard Termine The narrative, if you can call it that, is as pulpy as one of the aforementioned books, starting with Arias’s grand entrance: Tightly encased in a Thierry Mugler fetish corset and strapped onto a lazy Susan–cum–gynecological table, the chanteuse belts out Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” while being probed by aliens. The show only gets more inventively nutty from there. After waking up in the jungle and crooning “Jungle of Eden,” penned by Propellerheads’ Alex Gifford —the songs are all backed by...

Writer-perrformer Milo Kramer's one-act, one-person show uses their experience as a private tutor for NYC tweens who hope to qualify for elite schools as the inspiration for fictionalized musical portraits of ten children in various states of angst—and of the teacher who watches them cope with the pressures of parents and peers. The show generated considerable enthusiasm in 2023, when it briefly ran in rep with two other solo works at Playwrights Horizons; it now returns at the Cherry Lane, where it alternates performances with the extremely different Two Girls.

Two girls. One cup. What could go wrong? Eliya Smith's potentially shocking two-hander, developed with the Goat Exchange and inspired by the viral scat-porn clip that scandalized and titillated the world in 2007, does not try to dramatize the experience of Karla and Latifa, the stars of the Brazilian fetish film Hungry Bitches. Instead, it is drawn verbatim from conversations with men who have watched their scene—which inspired countless reaction videos online—and explores what they remember about it and how much about their own sexuality they are willing to share. Chloe Claudel and Juliana Sass play all the roles in what sounds like both an exercise in docutheater and a subversion of it; Claudel also co-directs it with Mitchell Polonsky.

This thriller by Danny Robins, the creator of the hit BBC podcast The Battersea Poltergeist, has been a sensation in the West End, where it has had seven engagements since its 2021 debut. It makes its Off Broadway debut just in time for the Halloween season in a production co-directed by Matthew Dunster (who helmed the London version) and NYC's own Gabriel Vega Weissman. Jasmine Cephas Jones stars as a woman who is convinced that her new house is haunted; Finn Jones plays her skeptical husband, and Anna Camp and Martin Marquez are the friends who come over to dinner and whom Jenny convinces to stay up until the wee hours to get to the bottom of what's going on. (Pitch Perfect alum Camp is reprising the role she played in the show's 2022 U.S. premiere in Los Angeles.)