(photo via The Bushwick Starr)
I’ll Never Love Again
Continues through March 19 at The Bushwick Starr, 207 Starr Street, Bushwick. Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8pm. Tickets are $18 and can be purchased here. More info here. Playwright and actress Clare Barron premieres a new work at the Bushwick Starr exploring the formative teenage events of first love and first heartbreak, constructed from her actual teenage diary. The piece is brought to life chorus-style by a group of celebrated performers, and features original music. Barron has recently won awards for playwriting, and from what I’ve read of hers in the past, her work is soft and strange, relatable but very specific. This show is sure to carry the same satisfying flavors.
(photo: George Maracineanu)
Continues through February 28 at Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street, Lower East Side. 7:30pm. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased here. More info here.
Trans performer Becca Blackwell, who recently co-starred in last month’s A Ride on the Irish Cream, brings their solo show to the very same theater. An autobiographical riff on Corey Haim’s Me, Myself, and I video, Blackwell creates compelling and irreverent humor out of past struggles with gender, sexuality, abuse, and family. Blackwell is a dynamic performer with a lot of interesting things to say, and I’m personally very stoked for this one.
FRIDAY
(Photo via lamama.org)
Continues Thursday – Sunday through February 28 at La MaMa, 74a E 4th Street, East Village. 7:30pm; Sunday shows at 2pm. Tickets are $18 ($13 for students/seniors) and can be purchased here.
No, it’s not the power you’re thinking of. Loosely inspired by Mary Shelley’s writings and presented by activist artist/scientist collective Superhero Clubhouse and Kaimera Productions, Jupiter explores what would happen if someone went and made all fossil fuels on Earth disappear. If that’s not intriguing enough, there’s a twist: this show doesn’t just talk environmentalism in its script. Jupiter’s set features a battery-powered, solar-charged lighting grid that displays, in real time, the electricity being used as the show progresses and the amount of CO2 subsequently being produced. Sounds like some bright thinking.
SATURDAY
The Disembodied Hand That Fisted Everyone To Death: The Musical
At the PIT Loft, 154 W 29th Street, Chelsea. 10:30pm. Tickets are $10 ($7 with code FIST). More info here.
With a title like that, who could resist? I saw this show in an earlier iteration at The PIT’s Bad Theater Fest, expecting it to be pretty funny and silly, but mainly in a crude, fisting jokes kind of way. Instead, I got a treat filled with sophisticated songs, self-aware but committed performances, and a consistent flow of humor that was largely whip-smart, taking a concept that would be easy to just write low-level jokes about and instead seeing what would happen if it was a more fully-realized musical. And also, people get fisted to death, don’t worry.
SUNDAY
(photo: Jacob J. Goldberg)
Continues through March 20 at The Metropolitan Playhouse, 220 E 4th Street, East Village. 7:30pm; Sunday shows at 3pm. Tickets are $26 ($21 for students and seniors). More info here.
Just to be clear, this is not about Dewey Cox. Alright, moving on. Walk Hard, a play by co-founder of the American Negro Theater Abram Hill, is part of East Village classic Metropolitan Theater’s 24th season. It chronicles a young black male boxer in the 1930s who is given a shot at the big leagues, but as one can assume, it gets complicated. Written in 1939 and hailed as an achievement for its portrayal of the “everyday” black man rather than giving into commercial theater’s fixation with black men from “the lower depths,” a 2016 production of this work is sure to make brains buzz about how we maybe haven’t come so far after all.