1,727 stories from Culture Bot
The work of Naomi Wallace has mainly lived on the fringes of New York theatre. Perhaps because it is too sermonesque, too figmental, a little delusive. I read One Flea Spare as a teen and fo…
Actual transformation will generate friction and call for care; work will require rest, and resentments made will require dialogue.
 In Family (2013), a group of three half-siblings live together in their childhood home awashed with the traces of abuse withstood by their mothers at the hands of their father. One …
New York City is a big place, but among stormwater and land use obsessed artists, it's a fairly small world. Sabina Sethi Unni and I are bonded together as Culture Push Climate Justice Fello…
 "I think she's a fascist director" was the last statement I heard before everyone got inexplicably quiet. I'm not sure why we all got quiet. I was too busy trying to figure out who the …
When you realize this, it feels like a punchline finding its hit.
And rather than looking harder at the actual landscape, she urges the landscape painter to go faster, so that via their painting, she can catch a better glimpse, and better see what she is s…
Do acts of kindness beget rewards? Do we become deeper by adding depth to others? It is hard to say, actually; I think the verdict is still out. But we have all the evidence we need, from hi…
Billy McEntee's Slanted Floors is an intimate exploration of a couple, Kaplan and Teddy, as they go through their day apart and then come together at night. The twist? We don't watch from a …
Color Theories by Julio Torres is not an Off Broadway Play. It may look like a play, sound like a play, smell like a play, but Julio assures us, it's not a play. No no no, there was a mistak…
The Matriarchs: detailed, metatextual, instructive, joyful, pleasurable, cozy, unexpected, provocative, and confidently obsessed with the inner lives of women at the margins of a male-domina…
As a writer, my primary focus is the infrastructure " social and built "Â of New York City. This summer, I found myself in a predicament. I had the opportunity to interview one of our pre…
In mid May, I sat down with choreographer Emily Johnson and scholar Kai Recollet to discuss their ongoing "kinstillatory fires" project"gatherings that bridge dance, decolonial practices…
"Why are you being so weird?" My fiancé leaned over and whispered in my ear. We had just been introduced to the Director of Communications for a book launch held in an office in Midtown…
Non-human animals are so often conceived of as wholly different from us: incapable of understanding emotions, governed by primal instincts alone, without agency. As human animals, we sometim…
Outside the LGBT Community Center, it was August 18, 2025, but as soon as I stepped into Room 101, I went back in time. People were wearing black t-shirts with the words SILENCE = DEATH blaz…
As he stepped up to his piano at the beginning of For Morgan, Nicky Paraiso looked out the intimate audience at Pangea restaurant. "It feels like family in here," he said. Sometime in the fa…
Site specific work is notoriously hard to justify. Dramaturgically, the decision to stage a play any location other than a stage can often collapse into a gimmick: a sparkly choice without m…
People perform for their phones, people perform for each other. We continue to watch.
There are aliens who collect your tears, a holographic strawberry, a Contribution Committee, and a fringe movement (read: cult) called The Spiral, among many other otherworldly beings and ph…
A fawn is a defensive reflex, a posture of affection that can only be taken in the imbalance of power. It's also a word for an unweaned deer, the first victim in Sophie McIntosh's tough litt…
Presenting the surreal is a way to get closer to the absurdity of reality. We are rehearsing the present, we are rewriting fictions as we go. And it makes me wonder about how we can rehearse…
The performance starts before it begins. A rug unfurled; A stretch to prepare; A folding chair opened to reveal the flat steel plane of its seat. There are bells ringing in the audience.…
A glowing platform. A cloud. A white box. A living room rug. These are the four settings of Caryl Churchill's series of one-act plays presented this past spring at the Public Theater und…
"Go!" is an affirmation of consent. Meaning emerges from this limited vocabulary as well. "Ready? Four!" becomes "ready for" a dangling question asking, "ready for what?"
