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Senior Critic Joey Sims has been very busy running around New York City as festival season is here. Below, a roundup of some of what he's been seeing.
DREAM FEED
Presented by HERE Arts Center & Under the Radar
The night before attending Dream Feed, I had a nightmare. In that nightmare, I was trapped on a sinking ship—a cruise liner, for some reason. My dream ended right before the moment of drowning, as they tend to do. I awoke with an overwhelming feeling of dread; it quickly passed.
Theatrical family band The HawtPlates’ surreal new musical journey Dream Feed, now at HERE Arts Center through February 1, artfully captures the destabilizing and often terrifying world of the dreamscape. Utilizing the trio’s blending voices, dangling chimes and even an autoharp, performers Jade Hicks, Justin Hicks and Kenita Miller-Hicks conjure a musical soundbath that, at its most intense, does hit upon that body-enveloping unease that lingers after a nightmare.
At other points, Dream Feed is softer and more contemplative piece. That whiplash is intentional, but the tonal variations do sometimes make it hard to lock in. In seeking to capture the multiplicity of the dream state, the trio and director Philip Howze have consciously set aside any hope of a central, driving focus, for better and worse.
I did fall asleep at one point in Dream Feed. But I think that’s okay. My nap felt almost baked into the dramaturgy—awakening abruptly, I felt confused at first, then gradually found my way back into the disordered musical journey. Like our best and worst dreams, Dream Feed is unsettling and soothing in equal measure.
IN HONOR OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
Presented by New York Theatre Workshop & Under the Radar
At a talkback following my performance of Roger Guenveur Smith’s quietly devastating solo piece In Honor of Jean-Michael Basquiat, the moderator opened by asking Smith if he wanted to describe his process. Staring into the middle distance, one hand held contemplatively at his chin, Smith smiled and silently shook his head. The audience tittered; Smith sent some warmth the moderator’s way, wryly offsetting any potential arrogance in the response. (He went on to answer other questions at length.)
That simple “No,” felt in keeping with Smith’s understated approach to his art, as clearly evidenced by the piece we’d just watched. Much like the writer/performer’s previous works (Smith has created multiple solo shows, though he is best known for acting Spike Lee joints), Basquiat is a sparing piece, forthright in its telling and unfussy in form. Speaking in his signature poetic style, Smith stands at a single microphone in a sea of darkness. The stripped-down staging keeps our focus on Smith’s words as he carefully sifts through memories of his friend, the revolutionary artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Ghostly lighting (by Arlo Sanders) and a transporting soundscape (created live each night by Marc Anthony Thompson) give Smith’s recollections a haunted, mournful air. He does not pretend to have been a close confidant of Basquiat’s—all the stories we hear, of raucous late nights out in New York, are likely the extent of the relationship. But Smith offers these memories as a gift, while also placing Basquiat’s loss, without falseness or strained grandeur, within a larger tapestry of extraordinary Black lives tragically cut short.
TIME SIGNATURES
Presented by Exponential Festival
On an anonymous chat forum tucked away in the deepest, darkest corners of the internet, a group of suicidal individuals find community. Each has a plan to end their lives; each has set a date for the event, their despair organized into a collective schedule.
Not that they actually talk about killing themselves that much. Mostly they chat about work, or movies, or, pretty much whatever.
Noah Latty’s bold, morbidly funny new work walks an impressive tightrope, hitting on every triggering topic imaginable with an unfailingly delicate touch. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a play dare to mention carnography before, let alone offer sympathy and complexity to those who seek it out. (These gruesome videos are fake, the group assures themselves—almost definitely fake.)
Time Signatures is overly lengthy, asking us to sit with the darkest of despair for longer than it should. It is also witty and deeply moving, treating every member of its 9 (!) person ensemble with tender care. We may not know their names, but each has an arc—and through hints scattered across Latty’s text, we learn so much more about them than they’d ever intended to publicly share.
This is a tricky play, and demands an ensemble working in perfect sync. Impressively, given the tight timeframe on an Exponential production, this cast walks that tonal tightrope near-flawlessly. Standouts include a shattering Kayla Juntilla, an improbably funny Felix Teich and a hilariously chillaxed Leah Plante-Wiener.
GET YOUR ASS IN THE WATER AND SWIM LIKE ME
Presented by The Wooster Group & Under the Radar
Every festival season has its reliable regulars, performers who somehow pop up more than once within a single frantic January. This year, one of those is actor/writer Eric Berryman. First a standout of The Team’s UTR piece Reconstructing, Berryman then jumped directly into a two night run of poetry revue Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me at Joe’s Pub.
Berryman is masterful as always, his wry wit finely balanced by an endearing sincerity. He is also the best thing about this distinctive piece, a live album of “toasts,” lewd poetry from the Black-American oral tradition, that originated at The Wooster Group. (Kate Valk directs, conjuring a live radio broadcast; Jharis Yokley joins Berryman on the drums.)
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The “toasts,” all delivered by Berryman with expert comic timing, are fascinating historical artifacts (all the more so because we can never know their authors, since the stories were passed down in an oral tradition). But they are also repetitive, most centering on lustful, “whorish” women inflicting themselves upon stereotypically brutish Black men. My objection is not a moral one—there is, to be sure, a self-awareness around these clichés—but rather that repeated variants on the same story just grow dull.
Still, my performance of Swim Like Me did feature one killer moment of improvisation between Berryman and his drummer, Yokley. Berryman asked his companion where he’d recommend listeners go in New York for great jazz . Yokley, after a long pause, deadpanned that he’d tell them, “You are seven years too late.” Adding a bit more banter between these two, the live storytellers sitting in front of us today, might help lend Swim Like Me some welcome variation.
VOYAGE INTO INFINITY
Presented by NYU Skirball & Under the Radar
An elaborate Rube Goldberg machine fills every nook and cranny of NYU Skirball’s expansive stage. Three doll-like figures in creepy masks, pigtails and square-dancing dresses, emerge from a treehouse. They inspect the massive set-up with childlike wonder. Then. as a live musical score creeps in (played live by Holland Andrews), the three begin to wreak havoc.
Or at least, havoc is the goal in Narcissister’s new piece. An ambitious work, Infinity plays on intriguing questions around the unseen labor of women in holding up the structures of our daily existence—and that very alluring instinct, more understandable each day, to let it all come crashing down.
But the company has not yet figured out how to traverse the long-periods of silent setup in between each chain-reaction of destruction. The destruction itself, when it arrives, is eminently satisfying; the finale, which blows the staging wide open, is a thrill. But at least half of Infinity is spent watching the performers do prep work, long sections of menial labor that kill any building energy or momentum.
FRIDAY NIGHT RAT CATCHERS
Presented by Live Artery; co-commissioned by Under the Radar
A demented circus of capitalistic chaos. I can’t claim to fully understand or explain Friday Night Rat Catchers, a dance spectacle co-created by Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein alongside devising partner Marianne Rendón. All three perform the work together, stumbling between manic extremities of stifling contemporary life. “Hosted” by a grinning talk-show presenter type near the end of his rope (Rendón), Rat Catchers is an absurdly entertaining cavalcade of desperate clownery.
My personal favorite vignette was the “Where are my AirPods?” dance, performed by Engelstein. “Where are my AirPods??” she asked us, over and over, checking every pocket, scouring every corner, contorting to look every which way. “Where are my AirPods?” There’s an old adage about repeating a gag so many times that it first becomes unfunny, then circles back around to being funnier than ever before—this trio understands how to craft a great skit.
FAGGOTICA
Presented by Exponential Festival
Due to a tragically ill-conceived staging, the action of Aeon Andreas’ intriguingly dreamlike nightclub romp Faggotica was entirely obstructed for the bulk of its audience. Standing in mosh-pits on either side of a playing area, myself and other spectators strained to catch a glimpse of the performers. Without a raised stage, most of us couldn’t see a thing. I gave up after 30 minutes, as did several others. Hopefully, the show’s creators and Exponential Fest can better serve these (very talented) performers in future by staging a show that the audience can actually see.
TIME PASSES (FOR ELLEN BRODY)
Presented by The Goat Exchange & Exponential Festival
Nearly the full text “Time Passes,” the decade-spanning middle section of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, is performed by (semi-ornamental) wife figure Ellen Brody from the movie Jaws as she putters around cooking, cleaning, and lounging at the beach, in this melancholy Goat Exchange creation.
Sure! Why not? Ellen here delivers most of the lines intended for husband Richard Brody (Roy Schneider on screen) to a huge inflatable shark that sits at the center of Claudel and Mitchell Polonsky’s delightfully off-kilter staging at Target Margin’s Doxsee space in Sunset Park.
“Wanna get drunk and fool around?” Ellen proffers to the shark, patting the blow-up creature on its side flirtatiously.
What does it all mean? Certainly the Goat Exchange team are having fun with Ellen’s relative unimportance to the overall picture of Jaws, a deeply masculine work. Given how large the shark looms in the mind of this movie’s men, she might as well be talking directly to ‘ol Bruce half the time.
Meanwhile the dense text of Lighthouse, tracing nature’s gradual reclamation of a country home left to rot, wittily mirrors the unexamined daily life of Ellen as she waits at home for Richard to return from the (shark) wars.
Okay, so parts of that are a little fuzzy. Time Passes is very funny, and the staging is certainly a giddy thrill. But the larger import does feel hazy. The overarching focus seems to ultimately land on the despair of the housewife, but I feel certain that Goat Exchange—an increasingly essential fixture on the downtown scene—is aiming a bit higher. Time Passes is still seeking out that solid berth.
To fully conquer her uniquely challenging dual role in Liberation, Kayla Davion had to confront a surprising challenge: opening herself up to love.
Even within a piece as delicately wrought and emotionally complex as Bess Wohl’s critically heralded new play, which ends its Broadway run this Sunday, Davion gets an especially tricky task in taking over the lead role of Lizzie (normally played by Susannah Flood) for one pivotal scene.
Best known for her work in Elf and Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, Davion makes her New York City play debut as Joanne, a mother of 4 who stumbles into the women’s liberation group that provides the play’s center. A former civil rights activist herself, Joanne spars with Celeste (Kristolyn Lloyd), the group’s sole Black member, around questions of solidarity within a majority white collective.
Joanne (and by extension, Davion) also steps into the lead role of Lizzie, the group’s reluctant leader, for one scene. And that was the scene that, for Davion, demanded a softness that at first did not come naturally.
As the run of Liberation comes to a close, Davion sat down with Theatrely to reflect on the experience.
New York audiences will know you best from your work in musicals—most recently Elf and Tina: The Tina Turner Musical. What has it meant to make your New York play debut?
I have always wanted to do a play, but I never thought it would happen for me. To be coming from Elf, a cheery Christmas musical about heart and love, into this feminist piece was kind of wild. I am still so grateful to Whitney White and Bess Wohl for taking a chance and seeing what I had to offer.
It was also scary, to be honest. I was legit terrified. What helped make it a safe space was being in the room with Kristolyn Lloyd. When I first got into the industry, I was obsessed with Kristolyn. And she would give me free tickets to come see her in shows. It was a full circle moment to now be acting alongside her, because she has inspired me so much.
What was different about navigating a play, in terms of your approach as an actor?
I grew up singing. It’s who I am, it’s the freest expression that I can give. Acting came later, when I had to learn how to speak in my own voice. With music, there is an emotional tie that is already put on the music. So how do I create an aria with this play? How do I create my musical arc in my scenes? What is the bridge for me? I had to use different language in order to tap in.
How did you work collaboratively with playwright Bess Wohl and director Whitney White in shaping the character of Joanne? What kind of research did you do?
Whitney was very good at setting aside time with each individual actor to figure out what they wanted to draw upon. She gave us all assignments: “You look up civil rights, you look up music in the 70s, you look up…” I was like, oh we’re doing homework! Okay, alright!
When we were off-Broadway, me and Whitney focused on how to stand in your feminism. Confidence in the sexuality and the sensuality of this character. So we looked at Pam Grier, who played Foxy Brown—that was my main go-to when we were off-Broadway.
For Broadway, we switched gears and dove more into Joanne’s background. She says in the play that she was a civil rights leader earlier in life, she was part of that fight. So I looked at [civil rights activist] Diane Nash, I looked at Amina Baraka—she was an actress, but also was an activist. The overall focus was: “What are the conversations that Black women were having in the ‘70s?”
There are some incredible videos out there. I watched clips from Black Journal, a talk show with this circle of Black women just talking about what it means to be free. Baraka was on that, and [journalist] Joan Harris, and [poet] Nikki Giovanni, talking about what they see as a society for Black people. Obviously, we don’t see that in this play, but I needed to sit in that basis and that foundation of where Joanne started.
Your trickiest assignment is taking over the role of Lizzie, the center of the play’s ‘70s set narrative, for one scene. Normally her daughter and our contemporary narrator, also named Lizzie, has been playing her own mother. She passes the baton to you for an intimate moment with Bill, her father. But you don’t really “play” at being Lizzie—it’s still very much your character, Joanne, who is experiencing this scene.
In the beginning, I had so many questions. I was like: “Y’all want me to be a white woman?” Then I’m trying to decipher how I think white women act…and that is a whole other topic in itself. Do I need to pick up some of [Susannah’s] “–isms”?
But no, it was not playing at something. Whitney always said to me: You are an actor in your body, stepping into a role. You’re always going to bring that foundation with you.
The biggest challenge [of that scene], for me, was learning softness and sensuality with a partner. That may come easy to some, but I had such a hardened exterior growing up that the vulnerability of softness, of love, is not always the easiest for me to show. So finding my softness as a Black woman was a big thing that we worked on. When I wasn’t getting there, Whitney would be yelling at me, “Kayla!” [laughs] And I’d be like, “I’m sorry! I swear I’m trying Whit!” She’d be like: “You can love, you can be loved, you can show it physically, your body doesn’t have to get stiff when you encounter what love feels like!”
It’s such a tricky duality—you are playing the love that Lizzie’s mother had for her husband, but at the same time, you are also playing Joanne discovering and experiencing the depth of the love that these two felt for each other. A discovery Joanne then tries to impart to our narrator after stepping out of the scene, so she might understand her mother a bit differently.
Joanne witnesses, from being in Lizzie’s body, this tug of war. There is joy to love, but there’s also chaos in love. How do you explain that to this girl who just watched her parents argue, who felt like her mother was under a “magic spell”? She’s assuming from the jump that there’s something her father took away from her mother. But Bill is saying: “I’m not taking this away from you; I want to be in it with you.” Lizzie comes in thinking that love and activism are two separate worlds. But he’s looking to combine them.
I love that scene, I really do. It’s beautiful to remind yourself that love comes in so many different forms.
Then you shift right into a fierce debate between Joanne and Celeste, the two Black women on stage, about their place in the feminist movement of the time. Joanne is challenging Celeste on whether these white women can ever truly be in solidarity with her. But even though Joanne is unsparing with Celeste, I always felt like it was coming from a place of love?
I’m honored that you see that, because that’s the main thing that me and Kristolyn try to make sure is in it. Joanne could walk away at any point, or we could be legit fighting at any point in this argument, if it were not to come from a place of love. From Joanne’s aspect, it’s all about: I want you to be free, and I don’t want you to have to play to any of these other women. I see that you’re educated. I see that you’re smart. And what else? Let’s go for freedom. The tough love is hard, it’s so hard! But so necessary.
You and Kristolyn have done this scene together so many times now. Have the two of you found new shades or subtleties to it together over the course of this Broadway run?
Me and Kristolyn find new stuff every day. I love doing that scene with Kristolyn because there’s a comfortability of Blackness, where we’re just like: “You wanna go for it? Let’s go for it.”
There’s a new thing we do when Joanne and Celeste both say “Had to be!” in unison about their mothers, how tough they both were. We found this moment on Broadway where we both say it, then look at each other and go: “Oooh.” This moment of recognition.
How are you reflecting on your time with Liberation, as you near the end of the run?
I feel a little sad. This is one of those plays that has really changed my life, in so many ways. In my research of the times before us, in my person and how I move through the world now in my vulnerability and my softness. That has been really amazing to experience. I feel like it’s opened me up. I don’t want to be that person to say, “I’ll never do anything like this again,” but it feels like that.
What’s next for you? Anything you can tease right now?
I can’t tease a thing. But just know, I’ll be coming back. I’ll be back.
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Not to stress anyone out, but we are 132 days away from the 79th Annual Tony Awards. Today it was announced that the 2026 Tonys will be back at Radio City Music Hall on Sunday, June 7, 2026 on CBS and streaming on Paramount+ at 8:00pm ET.
The Tony Awards eligibility cut-off date for the 2025-2026 season is Sunday, April 26, 2026 for all Broadway productions, and nominations will be announced the morning of Tuesday, May 5, 2026.
The Tony Awards are produced in collaboration with Tony Award Productions, a joint venture of the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League.
See y'all in June!
