Greenwich Village events: Concerts, parties, readings and more

In Matthew Libby's Silicon Valley thriller, Karan Brar—all grown up since his stints as an immigrant Indian kid on the Disney Channel's Jessie and Bunk'd—plays a computer genius who gets recruited into a potentially sinister data-mining operation. Brandon Flynn, Sophia Lillis and Justin H. Min round out the cast of the play's NYC premiere, which is directed by Tyne Rafaeli (The Coast Starlight). 

The unassuming-looking but keenly incisive playwright Wallace Shawn's on-again, off-again 50-year collaboration with the director André Gregory has yielded, among other things, the fascinatingly unconventional films My Dinner with André and Vanya on 42nd Street and the dystopian 2000 masterpiece The Designated Mourner. They reunite for Shawn's newest work: a sharp-elbowed look at a successful writer and the effects of his self-indulgent lifestyle on his wife, their son and the writer's longtime mistress—played, respectively, by the very auspicious quartet of Josh Hamilton, Maria Dizzia, John Early and Hope Davis. (On select Sunday and Monday nights throughout the run, Shawn performs his dark 1991 monologue The Fever.)

Theater review by Adam Feldman  The talk in Clare Barron’s icky, tender, gorgeous You Got Older is sometimes so small it nearly vanishes completely. Alia Shawkat plays Mae, a youngish lawyer whose life is in ruins—she has lost her job, her apartment and her boyfriend in one fell swoop—and who has moved back to rural Washington to spend time with her father (Peter Friedman). Between awkward pauses in the play’s opening scene, they discuss gardening, toothbrushes, sleeping arrangements; what they don’t discuss is his recent cancer diagnosis. You Got Older is less about disease than about the unease that surrounds it, and it beautifully captures elusive things about avoidance: It’s about the denial of death, but also the denial of living. You Got Older | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. Franklin You Got Older mostly unfolds as well-observed comedy that often ventures into morbid territory. When Mae and her siblings—blunt older sister Hannah (a hilarious Nadine Malouf), amorphous middle brother Matthew (Misha Brooks) and excitable youngest sister Jenny (Nina White)—gather around their dad’s hospital bed, they spend their visit bickering, teasing and commiserating about the off-putting family odor they share: “Mold. Mildew. Musty. BO. And egg.” A similar sense of bodily dysfunction informs the flirtation between Mae and Mac (Caleb Joshua Eberhardt), a former schoolmate she encounters at a local bar; she shares details of her painful rash, and he reveals that he is into that sort...

As a character actor, Wallace Shawn has an adorably unthreatening persona. But as a playwright, he bites savagely at the hands that have fed him all his life: the high-minded class of culturati that includes exactly the kind of person who is likely to attend a trenchant Off Broadway play about the disease of capitalism—and pay richly for the privilege. (He’s like a guest at a dinner party who distracts you with talk of literature and dance, then stabs you in the ribs with his salad fork.) On Sunday and Monday nights during the run of his latest play, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, he performs his purgatory 1991 monologue The Fever, last seen in NYC in 2021, the tale of an American traveler in a war-torn country who comes to understand the hidden costs of first-world comfort. 

British actor Jack Holden plays nearly three dozen characters in a true-crime play that takes a panoramic view of the notorious 1981 death of one Kenneth Rex McElroy, a brutal man who was so loathed by his neighbors in small-town Missouri that when he was shot on the street, none of the many witnesses would identify the killer. Holden wrote the show with its director, Ed Stambollouian; John Patrick Elliott wrote the original score and performs it. The production makes its New York debut for a limited time after several well-received London runs.