Indie Theater Thursday – May 15
It’s Indie Theater Thursday!
We share upcoming indie theater shows/productions happening in New York City. These are submitted by members of the IndieSpace community.
Do you have an upcoming show to share? Use the Show/Production Sharing Form to share the details of your show/production with IndieSpace so that we can share with the community.
The Episodic Theatre Project Season 2 presents: Don’t Turn Around Now
Location: Frigid New York/Under St. Marks
Dates: May 15, and May 22 at 7pm
Join the Episodic Theatre Project for five binge-worthy episodes of “Don’t Turn Around Now,” our Season 2 show. Over the course of five weeks, the mysteries of Knife’s Point will unfold in a series of self-contained plays with one central, suspense-filled arc.
Within the walls of Knife’s Point’s popular diner, secrets are brewing faster than a pot of Maxwell House. If charismatic millionaire Manny has their way, a new Arts District on Main Street will become the next big arts hub, overrun with artists, deep-pocketed tourists, and magazine features (plus murder plots). While locals are excited that their sleepy town will soon be revived, a few characters from Manny’s past will stop at nothing to prevent the Arts District plans from coming to fruition. Can Knife’s Point withstand the burden of secrets, pot-stirring, and small-town backstabbing? Only time—and five tea-spilling episodes—will tell.
In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY
Location: Multiple venues in New York
Dates: May 5 - 19
In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY is a showcase of performances from Italy, presented in the five NYC boroughs with minimal tech and set design. All shows have English supertitles and are free admission to all, offering Italian theater to everyone in New York City!
We Do The Same Thing Every Week
Location: A.R.T./New York Theatres: Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre
Dates: May 2 – May 17
Dick and Jane are bored on a rainy Sunday afternoon. A six-foot tall cat shows up, and hijinks ensue. Later, elsewhere, Dick and Jane are bored on a rainy Sunday afternoon. A six-foot tall cat shows up, and hijinks ensue. Everywhere, space is a false vacuum waiting to decay. Try not to think about it while your boredom gnaws away at you. We Do the Same Thing Every Week is a one-act comedy about repetition, boredom, and the delicious, refreshing taste of Coca-Cola®.
Those Who Remained
Location: La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, The Club
Dates: May 15-17 at 7:30pm, and May 18 at 3pm
In this transformative multimedia solo show, Sophia Gutchinov explores the profound depths of love through a deeply personal lens of Indigenous ceremony and modern dating. Drawing from her unique Italian-Mongolian heritage, she weaves a narrative that bridges cultural divides, reflecting her background of a Buddhist father and Catholic mother.
The performance incorporates projections, comedy, and spoken word, creating an immersive experience that confronts personal roots and identity. Collaborating with artists from diverse backgrounds – including AAPI, Latin, Black, LGBTQ+, and Kalmyk tribal performers – Gutchinov examines her family’s complex history, including her grandparents’ escape from WWII, her parent’s nomadic journey to…New Jersey, and her recent journey to her father’s homeland, all viewed through an intersection of acting and neuroscience.
Doctor Faustus
Location: Staten Island Playhouse @ Empire Outlets
Dates: May 16 & 17 at 8pm, May 18 at 2pm
In this atmospheric-horror reimagining of “Doctor Faustus”, Christopher Marlowe’s tale of ambition and damnation is thrust into the heart of the American Great Depression. Set against a backdrop of economic despair, Faustus, a brilliant yet disillusioned academic, is lured by demonic Mephistopheles, who takes on the role of a “puppet master,” guiding him into deeper moral corruption.
With every sin, Faustus becomes more entangled in Mephistopheles’ sinister puppet show, his every movement dictated by the decaying world around him. As Faustus descends further, the line between reality and nightmare blurs, and the Seven Deadly Sins—sinister marionettes who were once human, now acting as the devil’s “hand”—emerge from the shadows, their twisted forms locked in eternal torment.
This immersive production blends Marlowe’s original text with chilling visuals, occult traditions, puppetry, sound, and movement to evoke a world on the brink. Through the lens of Depression-era America, where survival is a ruthless game, the struggle between Faust and Mephistopheles takes on a terrifying new resonance, exploring psychological horror and existential dread.
dhoka/Betrayal/
Location: JACK
Dates: May 15-17 at 7:30pm; May 17 at 3:00pm
With a heady, erotic pulse, the sacred energy of fire bubbles over in dhoka/Betrayal/, an intimate dance-theater duet that entangles Hindu goddess Kali’s ultimate power with ethnonationalism. This fire is one that South-Asian artists and physical practitioners have harnessed since ancient times, acting as a reminder of one’s own power and as a tool of resistance. dhoka reclaims this heat to reimagine Kali’s mythology with the eroticism, androgyneity, gore, and epicness that often gets written out of post-colonial South-Asian art. With audiences peering into a fraught ritual between Kali and her follower, dhoka uses these aesthetics to trace the line between salvation and corruption, looking at how religion is used as a tool for propaganda in India. Letting the epic and human dance together, dhoka challenges a Hindu culture that is rapidly masculinizing itself to better fit a world of violence, invoking the feminine with one cathartic cry and a terrifying, bloodied tongue.
Outraged Hearts - The Pretty Trap and Interior : Panic by Tennessee Williams
Location: Houghton Hall Arts Community
Dates: May 15- May 30, 7:30pm
Following an acclaimed run in New Orleans and a NYC preview run at TORN PAGE, The Fire Weeds in association with Houghton Hall presents a limited run of OUTRAGED HEARTS - The Pretty Trap and Interior : Panic by Tennessee Williams, Directed by Jaclyn Bethany. Produced by The Fire Weeds.
The Pretty Trap and Interior: Panic explores early iterations of iconic works The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. Seating is extremely limited. General Admission means general seating, VIP means front row reserved seat.
Please note this show has immersive elements, and audiences are encouraged to arrive at the show fifteen minutes before the curtain to enjoy the pre-show. For all shows this will be 7:15 PM. There is one ten minute intermission. The entire performance runs 90 minutes.
The Fire Weeds is a new, immersive, female-driven theatre company committed to producing and boldly exploring classic and new texts.
The cast includes Chris Ghaffari, Megan Metrikin, Jaclyn Bethany, Jacob Storms, Lauren Guglielmello and Sarah Schuler
The End of All Flesh
Location: The Magnet Theater
Dates: May 19, June 2, June 9, June 16, and June 23. All shows at 6:30pm
The End of All Flesh is a rollicking, post-apocalyptic, cautionary bluegrass tale by Greg Kotis (Tony Award-winning co-author of Urinetown.) Join Ma, Pa, Boy, and Girl atop a distant mountain, where they sing about environmental collapse, changing gender norms, Hobbes, Rousseau, ancient Greece, questionable survivalist practices, and a glimpse of what’s to come.
Without God As My Lover
Location: spit&vigor's Tiny Baby Blackbox
Dates: May 22 – June 8, Thursdays-Saturdays 7:30pm, Sundays 2:30pm
Use ticket code OUTLANDER for 25% off
Without God As My Lover is a 90-minute two-hander about Teresa – a former Catholic turned atheist – who digs for the truth of her estranged father's last days by playing a game of cat and mouse with the priest who took her father's final confession.
Come experience this passionate, hilarious, and poignant new play up close and personal in an intimate production staged in the round with just 20 seats per performance and find yourself investigating your own relationship to faith, religion, and father figures.
The Leg.
Location: Mitu580
Dates: Saturday, May 24 through Saturday, June 7, running Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8pm
The Leg is an ensemble-based physical theatre performance that uses Butoh, Bouffon and Puppetry to explore the links between spirituality, pain, pleasure and politics. Drawing from the writings of Foucault and Preciado, this devised hybrid movement piece combines laughter and danger to explore the idea that we are all political fiction alive.
Use discount code LEG15 for $15 tickets
WE ARE NATURE: The Microcosmic Dance. Season Opening Event
Location: Noosphere Arts
Date: May 25, 6:15pm - 9:00pm
According to quantum theory stillness doesn’t exist. A particle can never be at complete rest. And vacuum is by no means empty space but contains fleeting particles that continuously pop in and out of existence.
Our 2025 outdoor season programming will offer a reflection on the fast indiscernible dynamics that underpin the microscopic world that makes up every component of nature. This year’s theme WE ARE NATURE: The Microcosmic Dance is part of the global celebrations of the UN’s International Year of Science and Technology marking the centenary of quantum physics. Through art music dance and other performances our featured talent will interpret some of the scientific philosophical and human aspects related to the quantum nature of the world. Uncertainty entanglement and delocalization are keywords of quantum jargon but also qualities of our lives. The season will explore creative intersections of quantum and human nature in a unique blend of art and science allowing the public to reflect on the beauty and mystery of our universe and harnessing the contemplation of microscopic frenzy to deliver inner peace.
May 25th Season Opening event will include:
A dance performance by our Choreographer in Residency: Petra Zanki
A Live Set by Lulada Club: NYC's all women salsa band!
Doors: 6:15PM
Show: 6:45PM
Sunset: 8:15PM
AT the Barricades
Location: MITU580
Dates: June 12- June 29
Use the code INDIE for 20% off your ticket purchase
“At the Barricades” is a source-based history play about the international troops fighting in the Spanish Civil War, co-written by the What Will the Neighbors Say? Co-Artistic Directors James Clements and Sam Hood Adrain. The drama follows six different characters from the United States, Spain and Scotland, brought together, despite their varied backgrounds, by a shared desire to fight against Franco’s fascist coup. We join them on the outskirts of Madrid in January 1937 and witness, over the course of a year, how their political loyalties, personal relationships and understanding of themselves are strengthened, challenged and irrevocably changed by the tragedy and the carnage around them. Developed through a partnership with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA), this prescient new play asks the question: how far would you go to protect the freedoms of others?
The project was developed at the Brooklyn Art Haus with the support of the Brooklyn Arts Council, and through a year-long residency at NYU’s Espacio de Culturas at KJCC with Director Federica Borlenghi and Script Supervisor Skye Pallo Ross.
The show will run approximately 100 minutes with no intermission.
Once Upon a Time in NYC
Location: Reverie Room
Date: June 13 at 7pm
Use the code INDIE for 20% off your ticket purchase
Award-nominated creators Shared Manifest Entertainment debut their first live theatrical production, Once Upon a Time in NYC, on June 13th at 7 PM at Reverie Room (163 W 72nd Street, NYC). Tickets are $15 plus a $10 snack and drink cover.
In celebration of New York City's 400th anniversary, six original 10-minute plays reimagine classic fairytales with a distinctly New York twist, including subway wonderlands, drag queen fairy godmothers, and the city’s ruthless housing market.
Directed by Jessica Thompson and produced by Jackie Jorgenson, the cast features Tehilah Keturah, Sami Binder, Nick Gangone, Airen Guevara, Abigail Espinal, and Anthony Castellano in multiple lively roles.