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A rip-roaring musical which portrays our road to national madness as a bad trip to Hades. Free performances will tour parks, playgrounds and closed-off streets throughout the five boroughs through September 15. Book, Lyrics, and direction are by Crystal Field; the musical score is composed and arranged by Joseph Vernon Banks.
FREE TO THE PUBLIC!!!
Coming Soon
EEEEEEEEE follows 4 women: Emily, Emilia, Emmy, and Eleanor. Just 4 normal women doing normal things in a normal polyamorous relationship. A supernormal polyamorous relationship that also happens to be a cult. A very normal cult that just happens to praise Ellen DeGeneres as their god. Ya know, Just girl things.
The show is a two-character play influenced by poetry, movement, and intense scenes.
What are Turkeys Go on Strike about?
This piece was inspired by the recent bomb scare at the Time Warner Center in New York City when the NYPD issued the directive “shelter in place” to people in the surrounding area. In a time when we are bombarded by news of violence and uprising, and seemingly paralyzed by a tumultuous political climate, we feel the responsibility to explore this moment’s impact. With both humor and critique, we hope to engage with our rapidly-evolving sociality and connect the events of today to what happened yesterday and the risks of our tomorrow.
In a journey of triumph tinged with bits of heartache, a scrappy Jersey girl-child navigates a changing world and finds the courage to live life on her own terms. Actress, soprano, and storyteller Tara Lake takes audiences on a journey into the world of African-American Jersey girlhood in the 1980s-1990s – a world of captivating characters steeped in family Sundays, church conventions, and extravagant reunions, weddings, and funerals. In this compelling sojourn embracing southern roots, gospel rhythms, and queer identity, one family’s love conquers all. Join us for an unforgettable performance of soul-rich theatre, storytelling, song, and poetry!
THE CAPTAIN, age 54, is driven to a mental breakdown by LAURA, his wife, age 36, in their struggle over the future of their daughter BERTHA, age 15. LAURA conspires with the newly arrived DR. ÖSTERMARK and her older half-brother, the town PASTOR to convince her husband that he is not the father of BERTHA. Unwitting accomplice in this is the Captain’s childhood nursemaid, age 72, who in the end coaxes THE CAPTAIN into a straightjacket.
Beginning on the one year anniversary of her survival of a mass shooting, Joy battles Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression, agoraphobia, borderline alcoholism, and the feelings of intense, irremediable loneliness. To cope, Joy locks everyone out except for sexual partners, her occasionally intrusive sister, Lauren, Mom, and Peter, the carrier pigeon that delivers letters from a mysterious Jordan. With the return of her father's cancer, her sister's impending wedding, and the allure of a not-so-distant pen pal and potential romantic partner, Joy must decide whether or not her shut-in/shut-out lifestyle is truly sustainable, or if there is more to living than merely surviving.
The motto of the festival is "Dream Up: Invent, Concoct." The festival is dedicated to new works. The question of the artist's vision to free or attack the material will be asked in each application. The festival does not want traditional theater which is presented in a traditional way. Theater for the New City wants to use this festival as a way to push ideas to the forefront with the hope of revealing roads less traveled or undiscovered. Presentation of a straightforward play must be imaginative in some way.
Festival performance dates:
August 25 – September 15, 2019.
All performances will take place at Theater for the New City
What is Second Chance About?
Still, Birth. - a play about pregnancy loss. A taboo subject for centuries, this play seeks to open the lines of communication between those who have been touched by pregnancy loss in any form and on any level. The play is co-written/in development by Robyne Parrish and Coley Campany who are members of the Labyrinth Theatre Intensive Ensemble - LAB NYC. Our piece is female-driven, written by women and directed by a female.
In “Dangerous to Dance With”, a broken acrobat, a porn star, a neurotic farmer, and a New Jersey plumber, who may be a hitman, meet in the secluded Missouri farmhouse of a successful, but paranoid, playwright. The playwright treats his unlikely collection of guests like characters in his plays. His understanding of human frailty allows him to manipulate their insecurity, greed, and hostility into situations fraught with existential peril for all.
A man walks into a lecture room and says to the class… no, wait, sorry. So there’s a lecture hall, a slide projector, and an apple… there’s supposed to be a man? Oh right, the man walks in. So a man walks into a lecture room—no wait, there’s no apple. What I mean is nothing is going the way he means, if he even knows what he means. A piece for anyone who has ever felt misunderstood, or felt they might feel understood but weren’t. This is Like That is a one-person play that grapples with questions about language, identity, religion, and the stories we tell others and ourselves. Also, there’s definitely an apple.
As one statue goes up, another statue is torn down. Shirley Chisholm, Robert E. Lee, & Me seeks to demonstrate how both Chisholm and Lee transcended the constraints of their time and made unpopular decisions that spoke to their humanity rather than the contemporary ideologies they commonly represent.
Relating their stories with his own life, Ashley Christopher Leach celebrates the unpopular choices each of these Americans made and reinterprets how each of them should be viewed. Shirley Chisholm, Robert E. Lee, & Me urges Americans to seek commonalities, even amongst the most unlikely characters, in hopes of healing an already divided nation.
It’s 2037 and the planet is teetering on the verge of a global economic meltdown as well as facing the specter of ecological doomsday. Against this dystopian backdrop, America has sworn in its 1st female President promising a return to values of austerity and propriety. Frank and Cassie Fornitelli, a struggling couple with some uncomfortable secrets between them, are visited by Whip, a senior government case officer for the newly minted Department of Personal Responsibility and Rectitude, who is charged with helping the Fornitellis get their financial troubles in order. Whip, an Asian-American with an English accent, is not the devoted, squeaky clean official that he’s cracked up to be. He has a dark hidden agenda. "Whipped" is a black comedy/psychological thriller that satirizes how the ideal of government by the people, of the people and for the people is all too often just an empty slogan.
Martha, a deity, contemplates destroying the world because there is no good left in it. A second deity, disguised as her yoga instructor, proposes fighting the system instead. But Martha’s husband Warren built the system, and somewhere on another plane, Martha is still in love with Jim Morrison. One woman plays six characters in Maker of Worlds, a play about creativity, Capitalism, and the divine in all of us.
“Abdication!” is a series of three separate stories, dramatic and comedic, each which take place in a different near-future world. The plot is non-linear, as each scene is a capsule, but a through-line of all of the stories is characters who are grappling with whether to fight for their independence of thought and feeling or rather to give in to a life that will be simpler and easier for them in the short run.
Harriet Powers, farmer husband Armstead and children live on a farm near Athens, Georgia. She sews and made quilts which now hang in the Smithsonian Institution and the Boston Fine Arts Museums. The play also depicts the African rituals and myths changing into Christianity. Set in the mid-1880s.
Kyle, an emotionally distressed man takes in a new roommate to help him get over his past relationship with Tina his ex-girlfriend. As the two men learn to live together Timmy discovers a secret from Kyle’s past that stirs up an emotional rollercoaster ride. How well do you know your roommate?
Written in the tradition of The Vagina Monologues, The Maternity Monologues is an episodic play featuring a unique chorus of all female voices working through the taboo subjects of pregnancy, birth, and child-rearing. Just as Eve Ensler’s play sought to break down the barriers of shame around the word vagina, and the recent Bush Theatre production Hijabi Monologues challenged stereotypes of Muslim women, The Maternity Monologues demystifies the female experience of pregnancy, birth, and mothering. Having trained as a BBC journalist the writer, Catherine Higgins-Moore interviewed women about their experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. She built on those transcripts adding fictional scenarios and voices, pairing them with current events to create honest and previously unspoken dialogues. At times darkly funny, sad, angry and isolated the voices in the play are an honest depiction of how these women feel about their changing bodies, finances, relationships, and mental and physical health as well as how they are valued from conception onwards. The play offers a uniquely honest look through fresh eyes at a brutal and beautiful timeless theme.
KIRA (Reincarnation) is the mystical drama, love story emotionally experimental play of eternal love with happy ending from the existential point of view, embodied and reincarnated into the ephemeral woman and a man (both eternal/immortal), continuously happening beyond space and time with strong emphasis on the true human values, continuity of life cycle and soul journey through different dimensions, bodies, spaces, elements, representing endless “reincarnation” life cycle.
WIFEY follows one woman's journey through marriage in the wake of the 2016 election.
Four glimpses into the life and relationships of Peter Cage, a struggling New York City actor. A man who lived by the sword and died by the sword.
Movie Star Hedy Lamarr and her partner, Composer George Antheil Invent and Patent Frequency-Hopping in 1941, A system of electronics used today in our cell phones, Wi-fi, Drones and Satellites, A Billion Dollar Industry.
Married to a weapons industrialist, Hedy heard about Wartime weapons. She wanted her invention to be anti-nazi submarines and submitted it to the navy during World War 2 where it was rejected.
Although a millionaire, with 6 husbands, 3 Children she dies unrecognized for the invention alone, in debt, and heartbroken.
REVOLUTIONARY is a sci-fi, acoustic rock musical about a conscious revolution in the near future, through the eyes of young homeless musicians. Life on the streets of New York is not easy for these kids. Some fall into drug addiction and prostitution, while others face different perils, like police brutality. When one of them is arrested by a robocop and carted off to a FEMA camp, the others take refuge at The Source Center, in an old, abandoned church. While there, they become entangled in an underground revolution to help fight the encroaching fascism. As part of their indoctrination into the movement, they undergo a series of training and initiations that empower them to become spiritual rebels to help save their world from martial law. They are guided by the charismatic leaders of The Source Center, who help the homeless youth, heal their addictions and activate to Fifth Dimensional Consciousness, through meditation, therapy, and Ayahuasca ceremony. Their lives are forever changed, and in their new found freedom, some of them enter into romantic relationships with people they never have thought they would. Together they all become the personification of the evolution of the revolution, as they shift into a new paradigm here on Earth.
In the solo play, "The Chaos Theory of Now," science nerd Jennifer Joy mashes up chaos theory with a Trump-voting farm wife, a liberal rural politician, an Evangelical homeschooling mom, and a teen punk Antifa activist. Inspired in part by her own Trump-loving farm family, Jennifer reveals how America got to this point – and what’s next.
This October, in celebration of Butoh's 60th Anniversary, the New York Butoh Institute Festival 2019 is proud to present bold butoh works by 13 female dancers from Japan, Columbia, Norway, Italy, Germany, France, and the U.S.
Curated by butoh artist Vangeline, the Festival will consist of an exciting program of butoh workshops and masterclasses, as well as seven nights of groundbreaking performances presented by Theater for the New City, taking place between October 17 and 27th, 2018.
Top photo with the text: Tove-Elena Nicolaysen. Photo by Audun Bacic