Anne Carson has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature," in the words of the Swedish Academy, which provides a biography and a bibliography of her notable works. Carson, 76, is dentified as a Canadian poet, but she has extensive connections to the theater, as a translator of Ancient Greek tragedies and as an original playwright. Some of her decidedly avant-garde theatrical works have been produced in New York over the last few years, including "

A little more than a year after Justin Guarini had been chosen runner-up to Kelly Clarkson in the inaugural season of American Idol, he was in his Bel Air mansion watching Saturday Night Live, when he saw his own face on the screen, and heard Tina Fey say on Weekend Update: “This week, former American Idol, Justin Guarini, was dropped from his record label” – adding “And now he looks like this,” the photograph morphing from the frizzy-haired 23-year-old Guarini to one of frizzy-haired then-62-year-old Art Garfunkel. This televised joke was how he heard that his label had dropped him.

“Slam Frank,” a problematic musical that revels in its provocations, winds up a muddle and maybe something worse. But it begins with a premise that at least is clear: What if a hopelessly woke theater company dramatized the story of Anne Frank – transforming it  (according to the show’s website) into “an intersectional, multi-ethnic, genderqueer, decolonized, anti-capitalist, hyper-empowering Afro-Latin hip-hop musical.” One might wonder right from the get-go:  Is anybody so hopelessly woke anymore? Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talks dismissively of “Woke 1.0.”  Still, I was amused by the opening land acknowledgement by the self-proclaimed “artistic director of a highly-respected and forward-thinking regional theater company”  (portrayed with comically fatuous self-regard by John Anker Bow):  He couldn’t remember the name of the indigenous people he was supposed to be acknowledging, so said “Okay, well, whoever they are, they were here first, and we are here now, and shame on us.”

On stage during the first week of October: Plays about the Epstein Files. Gun violence. Black women silenced. Complicity. Sexism. Homophobia. This seems an unusual burst of political theater even for New York. Maybe it’s because the midterm elections are just a month away. Theater Quiz for September 2026 October 2026 New York Theater Openings: Broadway Revivals, Off-Broadway Musicals, Acts of Resistance

Kramer/Fauci” is billed as a verbatim re-creation of a 1993 discussion of the AIDS epidemic on C-SPAN between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Larry Kramer, but the original hour on cable didn’t feature a caller dressed as a chicken, banks of bright lights shining directly at the audience's eyes, or a massive stage filling with soap suds.  No matter. Director Daniel Fish, whose dark version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” similarly featured some distracting avant-garde touches, nevertheless provides a useful historical perspective with this production, opening tonight at St. Ann’s Warehouse.

Czech playwright and politician Vaclav Havel, who would have turned 90 years old this week, was a different kind of president: He too had been an outsider with a visceral understanding of the connection between theater and politics, but he used it to defeat – rather than try to impose – a totalitarian regime.  A dissident and a political prisoner who spent years in jail, he led his country’s “Velvet Revolution” and reluctantly became its head of state starting in 1989. When Havel wrote “Unveiling,” in 1975, he had gained an international reputation as a playwright, but his own country's regime banned his plays, and he was forced to work in a brewery.  

“Under Siege,” an extraordinary work of collective theater written by dozens of Black women playwrights, which is being performed over the weekend in cities across America as part of Fall of Freedom,  began with a conversation between playwrights Lynn Nottage and Dominique Morisseau. Houston, Texas Atlanta, Georgia New Brunswick, New Jersey Seattle, Washington St. Louis, Missouri Washington D.C. "Black women, whether they be politicians or artistic leaders or civil servants or artists, are finding themselves being pushed out of positions,” Nottage told the audience at the Studio Museum in Harlem right before the staged reading produced by the National Black Theater. 

Below is a list of theater opening* in October, including four on Broadway – starry revivals of plays by Aaron Sorkin, Jon Robin Baitz, and Moliere; and a new monologue by Billy Crystal  -- while the new musicals are opening Off-Broadway, including a posthumous world premiere by Duncan Sheik, as well as adaptations of a Dickens novel, an F Scott Fitzgerald short story, and Maylis de Kerangal ‘s novel about a heart transplant.

How well were you paying attention to the theater in September? Answer these ten questions, plus a bonus question, to find out.

“Degenerates,” which begins in literal darkness and seems to work hard throughout its overly long running time to keep me in the dark, is a play about the incel community: Incel, short for “involuntary celibate”; community, meaning lonely men who chat online. Playwright Else Went doesn’t much like that phrase “incel community,” as she tells us in a note in the program, finding it an insult. But she has clearly done extensive research, giving what sounds like authentic voice to vitriolic characters “who are violent in thought, who are hateful, and who are drawn from real men.” They speak in a language of their own devising – “femoid” (a derogatory term for women, combining “female’ and “humanoid”);  “decile” (a ten point scale used to rank status in the sexual marketplace.); degenerate (a member of the political left, or the off-spring of subpar mating.)

Almost a decade after we first met the students at the Aburi Girls Boarding School in Jocelyn Bioh’s breakthrough comedy, Paulina, now portrayed by Denée Benton, is as mean as ever, the meanest girl in this school in central Ghana in 1986. But she is also the most popular – until, that is, her classmates meet the new transfer student Ericka (Jasmine Amy Rogers). Without even trying, Ericka thwarts Paulina’s campaign to win the audition to compete for Miss Ghana of 1986. The beauty pageant recruiter Eloise (Patina Miller) sees something in Ericka that she doesn’t see in Paulina – lighter skin.

Two more shows have been added to the Broadway season, both light fare meant to delight, while several of the plays I attended this past week were dark, their themes the threat of annihilation, the creep of autocracy – the same themes as in the non-fiction book I read, and the news I watched.

Addressing the audience as his congregation, Jacob Ming-Trent tells us upfront that the story he is about to relate – how a Black, fat, unloved, homeless high school dropout stumbled onto the Bard and vowed to become a Shakespearean actor  -- is not autobiographical. “This show is testimony,” he says. (Huh?) And it's only a one-man show because there was no money to hire anybody else, not even a DJ, and just enough in the budget for a church pew as the sole set. (Alexander V. Nichols' elaborate projection design, Jake Rodriguez's original music and Alan C.

Like the myth of Pygmalion, the kNOT theater company is bringing visual art to life, weaving together the centuries-old tableau vivant tradition with inventive 21st century approaches to create live theater out of a series of paintings by the 18th century Korean artist Shin Yun-bok. The process involves many strands, including live dancers, computer animation, digital puppetry, original music, photo capture, enough sound effects to fill a radio drama -- everything except spoken language. The effect is extraordinary, resulting in what feels like an exciting new form of theater.  “m…

When a hand grenade suddenly lands in their apartment, it’s just one more thing for the couple to bicker about in “Delirium,” director Igor Golyak’s explosive adaptation of Eugene Ionesco’s 1962 absurdist play “Frenzy for Two, or More.” The Arlekin Players’ production at the Space at Irondale showcases the inexhaustible calisthenic clowning by Chulpan Khamatova and Andrey Burkovskiy, both celebrated Russian actors now in exile. At the same time, a play that is so devoted to nonsense in dialogue and action more or less forces the audience to look for the allegory that gives it purpose.

Journalist Jacob Weisberg’s book presents portraits of eight prominent Americans who initially “recognized the danger Trump posed to American values” but in 2025 nevertheless capitulated to him: Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who led the court  in issuing decisions that gave immunity -- and in effect impunity -- to Trump’s lawless behavior;  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who voted to acquit Trump at his second impeachment trial, thus enabling him to run for another term. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, who shut down the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, and in other ways knee-capping the paper after purchasing it with a promise to protect it.  

In 1933, the Gestapo arrested and imprisoned  Hannah Arendt,  a 26-year-old Jewish scholar, on a charge of treason, carrying a possible death sentence.  This is the true story that inspired Jenny Lyn Bader to write “Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library,” the latest production of which is running at 59e59 through October 25. (“Mrs. Stern” because Arendt was married to fellow philosophy student Gunther Stern at the time.)   Since we know that Hannah Arendt survived, because she became a famous political theorist best known for her works “The Origins of Totalitarianism” and “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” it can be no spoiler that the Nazis did not execute her.  

In celebration of the tenth anniversary of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, which is one of the museums of the Smithsonian targeted for an unprecedented ideological assault by the current administration, here is a sample of the theater-related objects and images (among the more than 45,000 objects in the permanent collection) as well as links to theater-related exhibitions, curator-written articles and news from the museum over the past decade. The most prominent permanent exhibition  is “Taking the Stage” (pictured above) from which many of the images below are taken.

The last we heard from Alex Edelman, the Jewish comedian had won a Tony and an Emmy for “Just for Us,” his account of attending a meeting of neo-Nazis in Queens. There are several  e…

Thrilling: 40 buffaloes roaming in Brooklyn! A new theater and cultural center opening in Inwood! Chilling: The continuing war against culture in D.C.   This all happened beyond Broadway. Broadway still matters: All but two of the 13 shows  that will be produced the most throughout the U.S. this season either began or had their highest profile runs on Broadway. But theatergoers in the know  know not to look there for all that’s new and happening. Most of the 25 shows so far scheduled for the 2026-2027 Broadway season are revivals, transfers or imports.

The president’s announcement on Sunday echoed his justification for the White House ballroom: that the project was necessary for national security.

Internal emails and documents demonstrate the political capture of the institution, including how officials once pursued a plan to unload much of the art collection.

In one of the most exhilarating and purest works of theater in memory, the herd of forty buffaloes lumbered their way through the narrow streets of the city, snorting, twitching, swinging their massive heads, and patiently pausing at some of the most historically resonant sites in New York for a wide and arresting range of non-puppet performances.  Lenape elders and Native Pride Dancers welcomed them at Bowling Green in front of the National Museum of the American Indian. Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and actor Wendell Pierce read from a speech by Frederick Douglass in front of Federal Hall (site of George Washington’s first inauguration), with a musical accompaniment by Davóne Tines & THE TRUTH.

The artist Peter Max, who died on Monday at the age of 88, was best known for his psychedelic posters from the 1960s, but he apparently also designed for the theater. Twice. In 1967, he designed the poster for the Off-Broadway revival of "The Coach with the Six Insides," at the East 74th Street Theater, Jean Erdman's adaptation of James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," combining dance, mime, acting, and a stream-of-consciousness script.

In an extraordinary display of quick-hit characterizations, Sarah Jones cycles through almost twenty Americans, each with distinctly different accents, from widely different ethnic backgrounds, some even from different centuries, but almost all of them seem to have two traits in common: They like to argue, and they live with trauma. “America’s trauma has always driven our politics, and our politics drive more trauma,” Jones, as herself, observes near the end of “America, Who Hurt You?” Her vividly populated solo show, although often droll, spends much of its 100 minutes presenting precisely the kind of stories that the Trump administration is currently trying to erase from the Smithsonian Institution, and everywhere else.

"John Proctor Is The Villain," playwright Kimberly Belflower's response to "The Crucible," will be the most-produced work of theater in the United States this season, followed by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' "Purpose," according to American Theatre Magazine's annual calculation. The list is below, with links to my reviews, when available, usually of the Broadway production.

Jeff Hiller is trying to write a second book and hoping you will listen to the early versions of it at glamorous Joe's Pub. Won't that be fun? I think so.

What I found most surprising about this modest, appealing two-person musical, whose title more or less sums up what happens, was the reaction to it on the night I attended – the ecstatic cheers at …

How to describe “Beyond the Stardust”? It feels like buzzkill for me just to call it a loud disco with circus acts, given how the creative team bills it as an “Afro-disco-space-punk extravaganza,”  and, near the start of the show, The Illustrious Blacks welcomed us to this “place for you on the night, a place where you can fellowship with a like-minded higher self, living above this primal plane…” The Illustrious Blacks are the duo (Monstah & Black) who wrote the songs for this “live album experience,” and lead the seven-member cast of singers, dancers and acrobats.

Below are photographs from the original Broadway productions of shows that are being revived in the 2026-2027 Broadway season: Awake and Sing (1935) with Stella AdlerThe Sound of Music (1959) with Mary MartinEvita (1979) with Patti LuPone and Mandy PatinkinA Few Good Men (1989) with Tom Hulce, MichaelDolan and Victor-Love-The Full Monty (2000) full cast (including Andre DeShields)Other Desert Cities (2011) with Stacy Keach and Stockard Channing Photos not available:Much Ado About Nothing (first production, 1787)The Imaginary Invalid (1917)

Annie returns to Broadway Fall 2027 in a 50th anniversary production directed by Sam Pinkleton. Sign up for updates.

Lupita Nyong’o portrays a woman in the weeks and months and possibly years after she is hit by her boyfriend, in Marin Ireland’s play, reopening tonight at Greenwich House Theater after a short run two years ago Off-Off Broadway. In the aftermath of the violence, Nyong’o’s character (who is identified in the program only as “A”) meets with an unhelpful lawyer, a therapist, a support group; puts up with well-meaning and not so well-meaning friends; tries to tell her mother what happened; goes on awkward dates with new men  -- and through it all, remains feeling uncertain, humiliated, continually asking herself questions, like: Was it my fault?