"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?"
Ariel Stess, a playwright from the desert of Santa Fe, loves water onstage: kiddie pools, hot tubs, atmospheric pits and mirages and mirrors. Her crafted worlds are not just eerie, isolated,…
For a story honoring the history within the water, I am struck by the wind. It's 12:30 pm on a breezy Saturday afternoon in the Bronx. The days leading up to between wave and water are a…
At the conclusion of the electrifying performance of Curriculum III: People, Places, and Things, members of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company took their bows to a standing ovation f…
At the opening of Memory Piece: Mr. Ailey, Alvin…the un-Ailey?, we catch glimpses of Bill T. Jones dancing in and out of darkness. His flowing white pants and matching shirt caress his bod…
"What do we carry? What do we inherit?"Â On one of the first hot, humid nights this spring, I entered the packed Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research's intimate loft space on Huron Street…
Kallan Dana is a playwright, producer, theatermaker, and aspiring novelist from Portland, Oregon. Her work has been developed or presented with Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, The Hearth, The Ta…
 How does one take a classic literary work shaped by poetry and weave it into movement? How can you craft a physical manifestation of a character's declarative words and let their psycho…
You can't knock You Can't Take it With You. The 1937 Pulitzer Prize winning play, which just enjoyed a production at the Brooklyn Centre for Theatre Research, remains popular among high scho…
In the basement of the Flea on Thomas Street, just inside The Siggy Theater, two millennials Puff and Jame, are debating how they'll celebrate Puff's birthday. They've just finished their sh…
 Sitting down to work this afternoon, I selected to play my "On Repeat" playlist on Spotify: a selection of songs, continuously played, curated both by and for me. As I started this …
"Celebrations are rare these days." That's what Jame says to her best friend, Puff, the recently promoted and highly anxious manager at Revolution Cuts, a chain hair salon nestled in the mid…
For the 20th incarnation of La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival programming director Nicky Paraiso reminded us of the importance of experimental theater in times of political turmoil. Something te…
The other day, I watched a subway dancer fall. Backflipping between metal rails, his hand slipped and he crashed back-first to the floor. For a moment, the train was still. No one had a scri…