Philip Hartman's black-and-white "No Picnic" is at Film Forum til July 9: it's a punk As You Like It set in the sweltering streets and basement bars of the 1986 East Village. What if Jaques serviced jukeboxes and fell for Phoebe? Peter Hutton shoots NYC like it's Rome after the War. Gorgeous

Lawrence!!!! Truly the best place; wish I were there for this

Clubbed Thumb's 3rd show is Bailey Williams's superb The Family Dog, which I so hope will return next season. It's family comedy with thorns: wise, funny, mean, sacred. The levels of MOM! PLEASE! & DAD STOP TEXTING are off the charts. Sold out, but here's a waitlist clubbedthumb-waitlist.lovable.app

🖤 the obituary of one of the artist-founders of PS122, Charles Dennis...PS122 (now Performance Space New York) plans an Oct. memorial, but perhaps they'll also bring back Avant-Garde-Arama to honor his "punk wildness"...🖤 performancespacenewyork.org/in-memory-of... www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/t...

I think a lot about this rendition of Talking Heads' "Dream Operator" that he recorded with Maggie Siff during the lockdown: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_CO...

Dito van Reigersberg, touchstone artist for so many of us www.nytimes.com/2026/06/13/t...

The Clubbed Thumb people just added a Fri matinee for Derangements, which is the first show to reduce me to helpless gasping laughter this year. When I say playwright Nadja Leonhard-Hooper has EXACTLY matched Danny Wolohan’s freak, I know some of you understand what’s at stake. Get on the waitlist

The show in New York right now that I’m recommending the most is not on Broadway; it’s actually Morgan Bassichis’s “Can I Be Frank?”… I tried to think about how it works www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/t...

Michael Paulson and I did a Reddit AMA this afternoon, and he talked seriously about the terrible winds facing Broadway production while I failed to be normal about AI. www.reddit.com/r/Broadway/c...

This week in Talk of the Town: Shakespeare in the Park kicks off with "Romeo and Juliet," but with a twist—each performance ends with a real-life wedding onstage. I was there for the first one. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Jordan Baum’s excellent, trippy, anthology-style “21st Century Princess” is @ Collapsable Hole, and it’s delish. A Wellmanian romp taking the secret Mickey out of the happiest place on earth, it’s a series of vignettes of small world orderliness, erotic connection and line-standing psychosis…(cont)

This whole interview is incredible (h/t @cheatlines.co)

It’s here!!

Shauna Kelly and Theresa Buchheister in downtown Lawrence, getting ready to talk about Shauna’s book I’ve Got the Shakes about Richard Foreman…

My profile of Laurie Metcalf is in this week's New Yorker. We talked about Steppenwolf, "Roseanne," and her tremendous performance in "Death of a Salesman"—as well as her partnership with the once-cancelled producer Scott Rudin and her role in his Broadway comeback. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

I love this show, and this great piece by Erik Piepenburg shows you exactly why. The most deliriously entertaining experience you will ever have filling out a grant www.nytimes.com/2026/04/03/t...

I have accidentally seen a very good show that I'm terrified to spoil. I don't even believe in spoilers, but even this pathetic hinting-around that I'm doing is a betrayal of this totally non-slippery, above-board, don't-worry-about-it hour of non-creepy frolic at JACK www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticket...

R.I.P. He wrote one of my favorite plays, "On the Verge," in addition to his stellar TV work. Eric Overmyer Dies: ‘Bosch’ Creator, ‘Treme’ Co-Creator & ‘Homicide’ Writer-Producer Was 74 deadline.com/2026/03/eric...

I missed that the wonderful Billy McEntee is one of this year’s George Jean Nathan Award winners!!!! Bravo, Billy! english.cornell.edu/news/2024-25...

😍

Still floored by Kramer/Fauci at Skirball…grabbed random people today and insisted they see it. Daniel Fish directs Will Brill, Thomas Jay Ryan, Jenny Seastone Stern, Greig Sargent…as they repeat a Kramer/Fauci CSPAN appearance. Verbatim theatre vibrating at extraordinary emotional frequencies…💐💐💐💐💐

"Mano a Mano" at La Mama is what happens when too much knowledge about Middle English poetry achieves hyperdensity — then explodes out of composer/performer Paul Pinto's head as a one-man(o) opera. It's deranged (complimentary)...imagine King Arthur's court trapped in the Hellraiser dimension 🧵

absolutely incredible analysis of sheep-on-film here from Jackson McHenry, gets below the wool to the meat beneath www.vulture.com/article/shee...

Wow…a wonderful project and resource www.torchesnyc.org

rare overlap between "we watched this guy maybe possibly urinate onto the set in Richard III at BAM" and DCU news www.vulture.com/article/man-...

Much to my regret I only saw Emily Breeze's "Are the Bennet Girls OK" at Bedlam last night--they close on Sunday, and so the tickets are now TIGHT and also, lbr, pricy. But it's gorgeous! I had clocked it was an Austen-in-modern-idiom project and thought, oh, we've seen those already...(1/7)

I was fascinated to read this conversation between playwright Chris Gabo and Stephen Adly Guirgis since I saw Gabo's "The Surgeon and Her Daughters" at Theatre 154 last week and was having trouble placing some of its strategies... (1/7) www.americantheatre.org/2025/12/14/o...

I was just thinking how it was a bummer that the Cherry Lane Mentor Project was no more, and then This! Great! News! playbill.com/article/cher...

One of the things I love most about writing "top ten" lists is the absurdity. 1) you are constantly trying to sneak other shows in, because it's really more of a top 30, and comparison is invidious 2) your group chat thinks you're deranged 3) but you are 100% right www.newyorker.com/culture/2025...

Start spreading the news! I am thrilled to announce the debut of Sitting Ovations, my new YouTube podcast for Time Out. Each week, I will sit down with the creators of current plays and musicals that I've admired to discuss them at greater length and in deeper detail. www.timeout.com/newyork/news...

Today at 2 is the last performance of "Initiative" at the Public....I'm sorry not to have written about it (this has been a odd few weeks), but I so admired its ambition and frequent beauty. Else Went's five hour show about a "coastal podunk" teenage existence had me riveted for long sections (1/5)

In honor of World AIDS Day, I'd like to share a story that breaks my heart whenever I tell it. Please read it. It's the story of David Carroll.

Loss upon loss www.newyorker.com/culture/post...

Torrey Townsend's "Jewish Plot" has two more nights: tonight (Sunday) and tomorrow (Monday). It's the rare show where anything I say could undermine it; the tonal and structural switchbacks here are genuinely exhilarating & I don't want to ruin it for anyone who can get to Theatre 154 in time. (1/4)

In Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson's "Kyoto" at Lincoln Center Theater, the real-life oil lobbyist Donald H. Pearlman (played by Stephen Kunken) tries to derail the UN's Kyoto Accords by sabotaging a decade of negotiations aimed at preventing the climate disaster. His story's compressed but true. 1/5

NYMag blew up its story about ICE's increased presence at 26 Federal Plaza, and pasted it on a wall a few blocks away on Broadway

Richard Move's bewitching "Martha@BAM—the 1963 Interview" continues Move's long history of "becoming" Martha Graham—what started at a nightclub (Martha@Mother) in 1996 arrives on the BAM Fishman stage at last. Of course the eye makeup is TIGER, the hair is ARCHITECTURE, the torso is CANTILEVERED 🧵

I saw Jeana Scotti's "immersive" show Oh, Honey last season at the restaurant Little Egg; now it's back! A support group for moms of sons who have done regrettable things spirals into disarray...I can 💯 recommend the soup, as well as the up-close, phenomenal performances uglyfacetheatre.com/oh-honey

I've been thinking about Keanu Reeves & double-acts, and I got overwhelmed all over again at the loss of River Phoenix. My Own Private Idaho is so similar to Godot, though there Reeves plays the knowing Didi-type and Phoenix's narcoleptic ingenue is Gogo...I can see their version in my mind's eye

Liba Vaynberg's vividly drawn play "The Matriarchs" (directed by Dina Vovsi) features a rogue's gallery of wonderful downtown actors. Helen Cespedes from Fefu! Rachel Botchan from the Pearl! All doing funny, wise, detailed work in tight quarters @ TheaterLab...(1/4) theaterlabnyc.com/theaterlab-p...

In which Jason Zinoman tells Fallon he is becoming a Kremlin star... www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/a...

The tremendous Morgan Bassichis show "Can I Be Frank?" at Soho Playhouse has added a show tomorrow at 9pm! Everything else is sold out out OUT Bassichis is the funniest and most entrancing comic performer out there; if you don't take that last ticket, I'm gonna www.sohoplayhouse.com/see-a-show/m...

“I am heartbroken to report that after thirty-five proud years, the program I currently direct at USC, the MFA in Dramatic Writing, is being sunsetted…I feel the acute message being sent here; four of its five professors are people of color.” — @luisalfaro.bsky.social #TheaterSKY

Road Kills by Sophie McIntosh at Paradise Factory is a fierce, nasty little beast...its claws are out. An angry young woman sulks through her mandated community service, picking up roadkill—between scenes, we hear each crash, right before some gnarly blob of fur and blood drops onto the roadway. 1/3

Service announcement! The Segal has created its own curated listings site www.theaterlistingsnyc.com, which is now in beta. If you're looking for complete listings, I use the encyclopedic TDF (www.tdf.org/on-stage/sho...) or the Power Search option on show-score (www.show-score.com/shows/all?op...)

I wrote about the Edinburgh Fringe here, but I've also been mainlining Fergus Morgan (thecrushbar.substack.com) and Natasha Tripney (natashatripney.substack.com) et al... I clearly missed so much! What a thrill to be in a city given over to culture (10/10, 5 stars) www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Thank you to everyone who spoke to me for this www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Crystal Skillman's monologue "Open," starring the great Megan Hill, is a magic act with no magic in it--a woman, the Magician, boasts about the illusions she's doing in front of us (bird, rings, flowers, PRESTO!) but nothing actually appears on the empty stage (1/4)

Gospel at Colonus on Little Island is sold out except for standing room, but you can always shore up your disappointed spirit with this, Bob Telson's stunning setting of the finest of all Sophocles' choruses. Numberless are the world's wonders/but none more wonderful than man youtu.be/TiTc8O__9Mw