Each week, we share upcoming indie theater shows and productions 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.
For more coverge of indie theater in New York, please visit New York Theatre Review.
The preview image is from FRIGID New York, which is available for rentals.
A 5th grade teacher hires local performer Sunny Zimmerman to give a simple historical presentation as LBJ. The only problem? Sunny’s gone method. They’ve been living and breathing as LBJ, and LBJ has decided that this is his one chance to salvage his legacy – with an ambitious theatrical production. As his vision doesn't go according to plan, the boundaries between actor and role become increasingly blurred.
Lowelyfe: TURF WARS
Venue: Hunter College - West Building
Date: October 30
Learn more and get tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/lowelyfe-turf-wars-season-1-round-2-tickets-2002849338286
Lowelyfe:Turf Wars is an episodic live Hip-hop theater show. Dancers battle for control of Turfs rumored to hold power, memory, and healing. Come join Lowelyfe: Turf Wars, a live-action dance battle anime inspired by street/club dance battle culture, pro wrestling theatrics, anime storytelling, and fighting video game aesthetics. Featuring NYC street and club dancers, live music, characters, rivalries, and an audience that becomes part of the action, Turf Wars transforms the dance battle into an ongoing story where every confrontation has consequences. For those in the back, this isn’t your traditional dance battle! Choose who you’re riding with. Witness a unique way of battling. Remember what the world has forgotten.
The People Versus Lenny Bruce
Venue: The New York Society for Ethical Culture
Date: October 30
Learn more and get tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cause-celebre-productions-presents-the-people-versus-lenny-bruce-tickets-2003004125258
The People Versus Lenny Bruce takes a vivid look at the story of Lenny Bruce and his landmark New York trial, which was a critical turning point in the fight for free speech in the United States. Written by award-winning playwright Susan Charlotte, founder and Artistic Director of Cause Célèbre Productions, and directed by Antony Marsellis, the play revisits a landmark battle over freedom of expression in America — one whose implications remain remarkably relevant today. At a time when comedians, journalists, artists and public figures are once again confronting questions about censorship, political pressure and the boundaries of permissible speech, The People Versus Lenny Bruce offers a timely look at an earlier struggle over who gets to decide what can be said in public.
"User Agreement"
Venue: The Makers’ Space
Dates: Now through November 8
Learn more and get tickets: https://makersensemble.org/useragreement
The Makers’ Ensemble presents the NYC premiere of O’Neill Finalist Ben Holbrook's "User Agreement," directed by Dante Green. Set in the near future, potential soulmates Sy and Theo navigate their bond in a world enhanced by the wonders of technology, AI, and the occasional talking octopus. Building a relationship based on good music, deep conversation, and strong boundaries feels natural to them. But their beautiful bond finds itself struggling against a world turned upside-down by the demons of human nature and the need for capital - causing them to wonder if it’s possible for two simple souls to truly connect in a society designed to be more complex than ever.
Women Who Eat
Venue: Atelier @ Theaterlab
Dates: Now through November 8
Learn more and get tickets: https://theaterlabnyc.com/atelier-theaterlab-women-who-eat/
In this absurd dark comedy, six women recovering from eating disorders on a remote island are stranded when the electricity is cut to their residential facility during a hurricane. After running out of food, the inhabitants are forced to grapple with whether or not they want to survive, and if they can accept the women they become. It’s a dog-eat-dog world- and these are some hungry bitches.
Ivy Day
Venue: AMT Theatre
Dates: Now through November 13
Learn more and get tickets: https://linktr.ee/circlefestival
They’re the most prestigious universities in America: The Ivy League. And all of them release their admissions decisions on the same day. High school senior Andrea would rather open her results alone, but her friends have other plans. As the six students count down the minutes until they receive the results that will change their lives, hidden biases and petty rivalries quickly bubble to the surface, revealing the pressures and prejudices driving their desire to get into America’s elite universities. Originally premiered Off-West End at The Hope Theatre in London, nominated for Best New Play at the 2025 Standing Ovation Awards (★★★★.5, London Pub Theatres Magazine).
Faust Syndrome
Venue: Episcopal Actors' Guild
Dates: Now through November 15
Learn more and get tickets: https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/faust-syndrome
What would you give to right the world's wrongs? Your soul? Join us for Theater in Asylum's contemporary retelling of the infamous myth, following three activists who join a long line of Fausts, trading their souls for infernal power.
The Infinite Wrench
Venue: Asylum NYC (123.E 24th St)
Dates: October 30 & 31, November 6, 7, 13, 14, 20, 21, 27, 28
Learn more and get tickets: nynf.org/tiw
The Infinite Wrench is a barrage of 30 short plays the cast attempts to perform within a single hour in a race against the clock. Each play offers something different, be it funny, profound, elegant, disgusting, topical, irrelevant, terrifying, or even a dance or a song. All are truthful and tackle the here-and-now, inspired by the lived experiences of the performers. With new plays every week, The Infinite Wrench is the Neo-Futurists’ ongoing and ever-changing attempt to shift the conventions of live performance and speak to audiences, including those unreached or unmoved by traditional theater.
Tarot Cabaret: Halloween, Magic, & Music
Venue: A.R.T./New York Great Room, South Oxford Spaces
Date: October 31
Learn more and get tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/tarot-cabaret-tickets-2002296672247
A unique group TAROT READING through cabaret performances by Sunday Stages Theatre Company: a chill way to kick off your Halloween night! The AUDIENCE decides the set list by pulling cards in any order to create a spread with only 11/22 songs performed (so you’ll have to see it again!) ONE NIGHT EVENT - doors 2:30pm, show at 3pm
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
Venue: The Tank
Date: Sunday, November 1
Learn more and get tickets: https://thetanknyc.org/calendar-1/dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde
Adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novella and set in San Francisco 1971: this sexy, queer, violent take on the classic story questions what one would give up to finally be free to do whatever they want- no matter the consequence.
Ivy and the Poison
Venue: AMT
Dates: November 1-November 15
Learn more and get tickets: https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/rj-theatre-company/ivy-and-the-poison-ndash-circle-theater-festival
Ivy and the Poison is an original emo-punk rock opera that blends the raw energy of a live concert with the confessional intimacy of theater. When a love triangle at a New York artists' residency leads Ivy to fall for her supposed soulmate, their whirlwind romance spirals into a psychological nightmare. Armed with ten original emo-punk songs, Ivy hijacks her industry showcase to expose him, turning the opportunity of a lifetime into a spectacularly public meltdown. Inspired by Plato's Allegory of the Cave, the show explores the seductive power of illusion, the psychology of manipulation, and what happens when the person who seemed to understand you better than anyone turns out to be a stranger.
My Mobster
Venue: The Tank
Dates: November 1, 5, 8, 15, 19, 21, and 23
Learn more and get tickets: mymobsterplay.com
The year is 2003, and Joy Nash (Dietland, Twin Peaks: The Return) contemplates losing her virginity to a charming, enigmatic criminal from France. Free from her hyper-religious past, she's ready to stop living her life from the sidelines! As Joy gets tangled deeper in the mobster's web of half-truths, she finds herself in a plot straight out of a romance novel - her specialty as an audiobook narrator. The future may be scary (and thrilling) but that's the ultimate fantasy, isn't it?
Mirlitons
Venue: Le Skyroom at L'Alliance New York
Dates: November 4-6
Learn more and get tickets: https://lallianceny.org/event/mirlitons/
In this performance, it’s an encounter between two voices and bodies: choreographer François Chaignaud and beatboxer Aymeric Hainaux. The audience is presented with a total saturation of frequencies and muscles in this energetic performance, as the artists engage in a percussive duel. Through their voices, feet, arms, props and costumes, Chaignaud and Hainaux create a duet that is as uncategorizable as the word mirliton.
Outside the Game
Venue: IATI Theater
Dates: November 4-8
Learn more and get tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/outside-the-game-tickets-1994282340164
Set between Havana, imprisonment, and exile, the play explores Padilla’s confrontation with censorship, state power, and the pressure to publicly betray himself and those closest to him. Moving between history, memory, and theatrical reconstruction, it asks what happens when an artist’s words become evidence and survival demands a performance of guilt.
Balm In Gilead
Venue: The Greenhouse at Los Depressos
Dates: November 5-8
Learn more and get tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/luciens-balm-in-gilead-tickets-2003836912146
25 souls sit stranded in a 24-hour cafe in NYC. Drugs, sex and money satiate them through the thrum of earth’s turns. Suddenly, a naive newcomer has them asking: Where is the Balm in Gilead? And are we willing to accept its cost?
It's Not a Cult, It's Corporate! (or, the girlboss play)
Astoria New Play Festival Reading Series
Venue: QED Astoria
Date: November 6
Learn more and get tickets: https://qedastoria.com/products/astoria-new-play-fest
The Astoria New Play Festival returns to QED for its second year of play readings, this time with two full-length plays by local playwrights! It's Not A Cult, It's Corporate! (or, the girlboss play) written by Emmy Kuperschmid, directed by Emily Jeppesen: The staff of Flowt, everyone's favorite women's health and cycle tracking app, gathers for their first annual disaster preparedness meeting. But when the team gets locked in the conference room and company secrets begin to emerge, it's the meeting that becomes the real disaster.
War and Peace. Places of War.
Venue: Collapsable Hole
Dates: November 6 & 7
Learn more and get tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/war-and-peace-places-of-war-tickets-2002485858107
A group of everyday people step into the chapters on war, which many readers skimmed through in War and Peace. They have questions: What is war? What does it feel like to be in a war? Why does war happen? How can we tell who has won? They examine the battles, reenact moments, play characters, and invite you to witness with them what happened then and is happening now.
The Oldest Profession
Venue: The Hidden Jewel Box Theater
Dates: November 6 & 7, December 18
Learn more and get tickets: https://theoldestprofession.org/upcoming-shows/
The Oldest Profession is a mad dash through 10,000 years of history from a sex worker’s perspective. Kaytlin Bailey is reframing the story of western civilization from a mesmerizing new angle. Weaving history, stand-up comedy, and lived experience in a fast-paced and profoundly moving hour-long solo show. The performance is punctuated by a projected art history slideshow.
Adjunct
Astoria New Play Festival Reading Series
Venue: QED Astoria
Date: November 7
Learn more and get tickets: https://qedastoria.com/products/astoria-new-play-fest-nov-7
The Astoria New Play Festival returns to QED for its second year of play readings, this time with two full-length plays by local playwrights! ADJUNCT, written by Allison Whittenberg, directed by Kendall Carnahan: A grant-writing administrator (34) hosts a barely attended memorial for her poet friend who killed herself and her six-year-old daughter. While a Gen-Z student live-streams the grief for her Substack and a tenured professor drops truth bombs about the system that sacrificed them both, the host’s blue-collar boyfriend, already a father of two teenagers offers a hard-hat proposal on a couch littered with poems and unpaid bills.It is funny until it detonates. The play ends not with answers, but with a choice: one more child or one more ghost.
Play Without Ceasing
Venue: Bechdel Project
Date: November 7
Learn more and get tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/play-without-ceasing-tickets-2001402444588
Play Without Ceasing is a queer, campy, witchy theatrical reckoning with evangelical Christianity, religious trauma, and the rise of Christian nationalism. Written and performed by Wren Phoenix and directed by Ash Marinaccio, this part-docudrama, part-revival, part-queer exorcism turns sermons into performance, testimony into ritual, and religious wreckage into something unruly, funny, furious, and liberating. Come to church. Bring your baggage. Leave with your glitter.
Holy Help: The Dissolution Project
Venue: Trans-Pecos
Date: November 7
Learn more and get tickets: https://tickets.venuepilot.com/e/holy-help-the-dissolution-project-by-susie-mchugh-dancers-2026-11-07-trans-pecos-ridgewood-queens-6aa311
Holy Help: The Dissolution Project is a gallery exhibition and dance performance exploring indoctrination, exploitation and human vulnerability. Inspired by real-life high-control groups such as Heaven's Gate, People's Temple, Charles Mansons' Family, and the Rajneeshees, the work examines how belonging and devotion can be manipulated until individuals lose their sense of self. Through Susie's dark aesthetic and immersive story-telling, it explores how vulnerable we are to influence.
Show Up, Kids!
Venue: The Rat
Dates: November 7, 21, & 28
Learn more and get tickets: https://showup-theshow.com/
This interactive show for kids 3-10 years old puts a wildly comedic twist on the traditional kids’ show. When the main attraction is a no-show, hapless host Bebe gets the kids (and their grownups) to help create a comedy show on the spot by choosing plot, props, characters, costumes, and settings - resulting in a wildly unpredictable, one-of-a-kind, 45-minute laughfest. Now in its 8th year!
Refrigerator Stories: A Search for Home
Venue: Scholes Street Studio (Brooklyn)
Date: November 8
Learn more and get tickets: https://refrigerator-stories.josdirkx.com
Ever feel like you're almost home, never quite? Come spend an evening with people who feel it, too. On Sunday 8 November at 8:00pm, Jos Dirkx brings a workshop performance of her solo show with music, Refrigerator Stories: A Search for Home, to Scholes Street Studio in Brooklyn. An intimate evening of real life stories and original songs about belonging and where to find home after a life lived across many countries, with music by Emmy-winning composer Sacha Hoedemaker. The show is performed in English.
SESTERCENTENNIAL
Venue: The Vino Theater
Dates: November 9 - 12
Learn more and get tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sestercentennial-tickets-2002734470714?aff=oddtdtcreator
SESTERCENTENNIAL is a new hour long solo play written in the second person that contemplates race’s inescapable role in American politics and social life. You are Hamza Beshara, a conservative Bangladeshi American hosting an indoor barbecue for your (white) best friends on July 4, 2026 - America’s 250th Birthday. But something is clearly amiss, forcing you to reflect on your relationships to your culture and friends, and the divisions and contradictions, longstanding and new, that exist between them and within yourself.
First and Last
Venue: ARTX
Dates: November 10-22
Learn more and get tickets: https://www.openvariationstheater.com/first-and-last
2003, Washington Heights. Morris, a cash-strapped real estate agent, is showing a decrepit rental to Maeve, an artist’s assistant desperate for a place to live. Amid broken elevators, feuding neighbors, and the ghost of a dead kitten, a routine apartment showing becomes more than they both bargained for. Offbeat and heartfelt, FIRST AND LAST is about the people who enter our lives, if only for a chapter, and the strange way memory edits life down to its most vivid arrivals and departures.
Lucie Pohl: Old as Mold
Venue: The Hidden Jewel Box Theater
Date: November 12
Learn more and get tickets: oldasmold.eventbrite.com
Comedian Lucie Pohl tapes her first comedy special presented by the New York Comedy Festival! Old As Mold is a new solo comedy hour diving into the chaos and wisdom of life as a woman over 40 but somehow still under 5”5.
Fourth Avenue (Brooklyn)
Venue: The Old Stone House
Dates: November 12-15, 19, 20, & 22
Learn more and get tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/new-play-fourth-avenue-brooklyn-tickets-1989959455299
A new American play about an old American story. It follows a park ranger and lifelong Fourth Avenue resident who has lost his childhood home to the development reshaping the neighborhood, and who decides to take matters into his own hands. As the buildings go up, the people change.
A Night With Mr. Wonderful
Venue: The Hidden Jewel Box Theater
Date: November 13
Learn more and get tickets: mrwonderful.eventbrite.com
Experience the unforgettable journey of Sammy Davis Jr. in A Night With Mr. Wonderful, a dynamic variety show capturing the icon at the height of his global fame. Set against the vibrant 1960s and 1970s, this production fuses spectacular live performances of hits like Mr. Bojangles with the gripping story of Davis’s evolution from superstar to a fierce activist fighting racial inequality. Beyond the glamour, it reveals the intense personal and professional struggles he faced navigating a white-dominated industry. Driven by themes of resilience and the unifying power of music, this vibrant celebration is a must-see for anyone who loves history, legendary songs, and stellar live theater.
Pearl Necklace
Venue: The Hidden Jewel Box Theater
Date: November 14
Learn more and get tickets: pearlnecklace.eventbrite.com
Pearl Necklace is a dirty comedy dripping in burlesque glamour, vintage decadence, and a touch of film noir. Telling stories from her glamorous—and not-so-glamorous—life, Natalie Perlin brings a comedy that’s sharp and wicked, yet unexpectedly sweet and melancholy, finding humor in the timeless, titillating absurdity of being a woman in the modern world. Definitely not for pearl clutchers. After all, Pearl Necklace is more than just jewelry.
The Undercity
Venue: La MaMa
Dates: November 14-16
Learn more and get tickets: https://lamama.org/the-undercity/
Set in the great rat metropolis beneath our feet—a 1970s New York-inspired neon-lit underworld—the show follows Rat Girl, as she uncovers a vast conspiracy that threatens the fate of her world.
Fertile Ground
Venue: Green Space
Date: November 15
Learn more and get tickets: https://secure.lglforms.com/form_engine/s/Sy1OrIUyioyh0DGnSGMcJA
Welcome to our 2026-2027 Season of Fertile Ground! Fertile Ground is a monthly new works series for emerging choreographers and experimenting, established professionals. Six artists present a work-in-progress and receive audience-driven feedback in a post-performance discussion (with wine!) moderated by Artistic Director, Valerie Green. With your constructive input you can help artists cultivate and grow their work!
The Wayfaring Strangers
Venue: The Pit
Dates: November 15 and December 13
Learn more and get tickets: https://tinyurl.com/waystrangeape
Join The Wayfaring Strangers at The PIT on October 11 at 7pm for an improvised bluegrass musical, featuring brand spankin’ new lyrics to old-timey standards, played on traditional instruments like banjo, guitar, stand up bass, washboard, triangle and jug.
Losing Your Bag
Venue: Le Skyroom atvL'Alliance New York
Dates: November 19–21
Learn more and get tickets: https://lallianceny.org/event/losing-your-bag/
Making its English-language premiere, this one-woman piece is a collaboration between renowned French playwright Pascal Rambert and actress Pauline Chalamet. The play follows a young woman with a Master’s degree, who is—temporarily—a window cleaner. Over the course of the performance, she expresses her anger at social stratification and grapples with loneliness, in a world divided between “people who succeed and people who are nothing.”
Romeo x Juliet
Venue: East Village Basement
Dates: November 27-29
Learn more and get tickets: https://events.humanitix.com/romeo-x-juliet
New Orange Theatre Company returns to their beloved stomping ground, East Village Basement, to interrogate the greatest Romance of our time with their full-bodied blend of macabre irreverence. It's a comedy, it's a tragedy, it's a seance, it's a night of karaoke. It's an adaptation as profane as it is sacred. You'll only know for sure if you're there.
Creation Story
Venue: Teatro Circulo
Dates: December 10 – January 3
Learn more and get tickets: https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/creation-story
Creation Story by Octavia Chavez-Richmond is a Chicanofuturist musical that blends myth, migration, and environmental collapse with rancheras, baladas, and desert-born sounds, following a writer and her unruly characters as they unravel the mysteries of creation, destruction, and cultural memory.