
Adaeze Oforiwaa's "Declarant" Gets World Premiere at The Meridian Workshop
The announcement that Adaeze Oforiwaa's "Declarant" will receive its world premiere at The Meridian Workshop this November is worth more than a calendar note.
TopicsOff-Broadway
Downtown theater, new plays, and the Off-Broadway rooms where the form gets reinvented — sharp criticism and coverage of the plays that matter, from the Broadway Show Girls.

The announcement that Adaeze Oforiwaa's "Declarant" will receive its world premiere at The Meridian Workshop this November is worth more than a calendar note.

The Foundling Stage filmed "The Inventory of Damage" over three performances last winter, and the announcement that the stage film will debut on Clearview next month means that Celeste

The full cast for Yemisi Adade's "The Silt Beneath" is set, and the ensemble director Marguerite Fontenot has assembled for the October Off-Broadway premiere looks like it was chosen by someone who

Zora Adeyemi's "Dead Channel" is coming to Meridian Stage this November, and the announcement is not primarily a casting story.

The Dunmore Workshop's production of "The Littoral Register" opens September 12, and the question Cressida Abara has baked into its formal structure is not a comfortable one: what does verbatim

Sola Mabunda's "Where the Floor Softens" is structurally unusual in a way that is either going to be its defining strength or its central problem, and the Lighthouse Workshop's decision to attach

The world premiere of Celestine Achebe-Morris's All the Waiting Rooms will open at The Bowery Workshop this October, and the newly announced cast confirms that director Farida Kazmi is not blinking.

Nadia Okonkwo's "What the Hands Hold" is formally the most interesting new play scheduled for Off-Broadway this fall, and the announcement that Meridian Stage will produce it at the Calloway Street

The most structurally ambitious new play opening downtown this fall belongs to a playwright most of you haven't heard of yet.

Zara Okonkwo is the most structurally ambitious playwright I have encountered in three years of watching downtown writers try to solve the multigenerational family play.

"Gone Signal" is formally organized around a question that theater has not often asked this directly: what does it mean to search for someone when the searching itself becomes a performance?

Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off — the labels sound like a hierarchy of prestige. Priya Raghunathan explains what they actually measure, and why the smallest rooms so often make the biggest work.

Downtown theater keeps treating a Broadway transfer as proof that a new play mattered. Priya Raghunathan would like everyone to stop confusing scale with artistic success.

The Olive Street Theatre announced yesterday that Rafaela Nkosi's The Condition will extend through September 20th, and I mean this without qualification: the play has earned it.

The announcement that Nadia Seo-Brandt is returning to New York with a new play — "The Stays," set for a limited off-Broadway run this fall at the Tidewater Lab — is the kind of news that actually

The news that Lateral Line is extending through August 22nd gives everyone who missed Davi Okonkwo's site-specific play at the Meridian Building a second shot at the most formally interesting piece

The Polestar has done something quietly confident with its fall announcement: they've given Wren Alcántara seventy-two seats and a mandate to write the domestic immigrant play as temporal argument

Mateo Delacroix's "Proof of Residency," which opened last week at The Silt Lab, is running at about eighty percent of what it's attempting — and what it's attempting is formally demanding enough that

Adaeze Nwoku's "The Arithmetic of Ghosts" announced this week that it will transfer from the Foundry Box — where it has been running to houses of fifty-two people for four months — to the Meridian

Sela Abioye's Partial Inventory was always going to be a play about the instability of testimony, so the Clementine Stage's decision to announce a rotating principal cast for its fall run reads less

Theodora Vance's "The Interval" is the most formally rigorous new play downtown has produced this season, and it just got more interesting.

Nadia Ferreira-Bloom's The Interval, now in its world premiere at the Meridian Stage Loft, is the most formally serious new play I have seen downtown this summer.

"What Remains," which opened Thursday at Thistle Rep, is the best new play I've seen this season at a house under 150 seats, and it's not particularly close.

Lena Voronova's debut season as artistic director at The Seam Theatre does something that off-Broadway programming almost never does: it has a thesis.

"Daughters of the Harmattan" earned its transfer. Let me say that before the details, because the details will make more sense that way.

Off-Broadway's latest sensation, "Awakening," has drawn attention to a new wave of female voices emerging in theater.

Theater has long been an adult game, but with the arrival of "Growing Pains," written by debut playwright Aarushi Patel, there's a new force stepping onto the Off-Broadway stage.

Rising playwright Avni Patel’s debut work, "Unseen," makes its world premiere at the intimate Workshop Theater this month.

Priya Raghunathan reports on the announced transfer of Kwame Osei-Bonsu's landmark new play from the Vineyard Theatre to Second Stage, where it will open in September.