THURSDAY

(flyer via littlefield)

A Gay Show For All People
Thursday, December 28 at littlefield, 7 pm doors, 8 pm show: $10

If you’re looking to literally make the yuletide gay, you have plenty of chances to do so at the holiday spectacular edition of Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp’s A Gay Show For All People. True to its name, this show features “comics and queers and mostly people who are both” doing their thing onstage while anyone who so desires to attend watches. The lineup is quite “stacked,” as the teens say, with Cole Escola, Naomi Ekperigin, Patti Harrison, Blake Daniel, Liza Treyger, Larry Owens, Bowen Yang and Matt Roger’s improv duo Sluck, Henry Koperski and His Straights, a live band playing “vodka songs,” and possibly more.

FRIDAY

(image via Caveat / Facebook)

The Lab
Friday, December 29 at Caveat, 9 pm: $8

“Experimental” can mean a lot of things, particularly when it’s referring to performance. It can signal a pretentious durational piece meant to test your patience and attention span, a provocative solo show that provokes more than just thoughts, genuinely thrilling and interesting uncommon creations, and much more, including experiments that induce more cringes than one would think possible. New comedy variety show The Lab leans more in the scientific direction when welcoming “experiments” to their stage, but this doesn’t just mean mixing chemicals and articulating hypotheses. Hosts Shannon Odell, Joanna Rothkopf, and Jordan Mendoza (all of Drunk Science) welcome the silliest, strangest, and most questionable work exploring anything from birds to Yahtzee. Tonight’s show features Aparna Nancherla, Sudi Green, Sam Taggart, and Brian Park.

SATURDAY

(image via The Mushroom Cure / Facebook)

The Mushroom Cure
Now through January 7 at Theater 80 St. Marks, 7:30 pm (select performances at other times): $35

Personally, I grew up not really liking mushrooms but I never gave them a fair chance. So, recently, I have been cooking stuff with them in an effort to like them and it is kind of actually working. Of course, I’m talking about your regular, run-of-the-mill, non-hallucinogenic mushrooms. Surely you’re here to get the dirt (literally, probably) on the trippy version. If so, route your mind to The Mushroom Cure, a solo show by Adam Strauss about his quest to treat his debilitating OCD using psilocybin mushrooms, DIY-style. Does it work? Enough for him to make a show about it, I suppose. Though it’s a show written and performed by just one person, Strauss is joined by director Jonathan Libman, and has garnered the sponsorship of The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies and a grant from the Foundation for Fairer Capitalism.