Discover your identity. Find your person. Or, if all else fails, get a dog. 

Off-Broadway is positively littered with solo shows right now—such are the industry’s financial straits. For each of these lonely performers, salvation arrives in a very different form. The answer might be a loving pet, or a devoted partner, or profound self-acceptance….or just some really good sex. If, indeed, any answers arrive at all. No surprise that the strongest works of this bunch decline, ultimately, to provide any easy catharsis. 

For Ari’el Stachel, author and performer of Other (at Greenwich House Theater through December 6), the core struggle is identity. A deserved 2018 Tony Award winner for The Band’s Visit, the performer works through an exhaustive array of challenges in just 90 minutes, all framed around Statchel’s own struggle of selfhood: his confused adolescence as an Arab Jew, discrimination against Arab-Americans after 9/11, panic attacks on Broadway and, finally, the ongoing fallout of the Gaza war.

To give it all shape, Stachel tends to break his own life into distinct sections, packaging the personal and political with a tidiness that doesn’t always ring true. A less diffuse structure might have allowed some room for Stachel to, where needed, dig a little deeper. His performance work is also overly broad, particularly when it comes to the friends and peers that float through Stachel’s life. All but the performer’s family feel like types, not fully formed humans—gay best friend, annoying NYU student, nagging Jewish elder, etc. In experiencing Other, I was reminded of the incredible precision that solo work demands, and how easy it can be to slide into caricature. 

Still, Statchel’s openness around grappling with anxiety is refreshing. He is also remarkably honest about his own failings, particularly the years spent keeping his Yemenite Israeli father at arm’s length. Comfort with his own identity is what allows Stachel to extend a full, unburdened love to others. At least for this anxiety sufferer, that rings true. 

Extending full, unburdened love to others is also the focus of Brandon Kyle Goodman’s Heaux Church—albeit in a slightly different sense. This joyous piece, at Ars Nova through November 21, is a celebration of unadulterated sexual pleasure. Goodman warmly leads us through a judgement-free sex talk, pushing past any nervousness or shame the topic brings up with skillful ease. Specific and even hands-on, Heaux Church is a happy relief from theater as feelgood sloganery. “Love thy neighbor” is a nice sentiment, sure—but Goodman will actually show you how. (Demonstrating on a Krispy Kreme donut, no less.) 

Sharply directed by Lisa Owaki Bierman, Heaux Church is not technically a solo piece—it should be noted that Goodman receives essential support from DJ Ari Grooves and Greg Corbino, who operates some very talkative puppets resembling a butthole, penis and vulva. It works only because Goodman is so totally at ease with themselves, a comfort that extends into the audience. That self-love is, we will come to learn, hard-won after a long journey (much like Stachel’s). But Goodman eases through the toughest part of that story, sandwiching the pain between joy on either side.

By contrast, Zoë Kim’s Did You Eat? (밥 먹었니?) ambushes its audience with a shocking, unsettling account of parental abuse and family trauma. Perhaps “ambushes” is an unfair word. But the structure of this Ma-Yi Theater Company production (at The Public Theater through November 16) feels a tad cruel to the viewer. As shaped by Kim and director Chris Yejin, the piece’s early sections do not really prepare us for what’s to come. So harsh is the tonal shift that it’s difficult for Kim to rein it back when her journey does, thankfully, take a turn for the better. 

It’s a bit obscene, I know, to complain that a person’s story—their life, the experiences they lived—is more than you can take. But tales of trauma can easily wind up numbing.

When Kim does ultimately pull us out of that abyss, she does it with a dog. His name is Spaceman. He is, as the stage directions aptly state, “the cutest dog in the world.” Now, of course, a cute dog is always a winner. But more importantly, the arrival of Spaceman (along with Kim’s eventual partner, her person) eases Eat into a space where love and pain can co-exist. Still, with some distance from Kim’s show, I can more easily admire her refusal to counterbalance the pain at her story’s center.

An adorable dog also proves central to David Cale’s Blue Cowboy, a far gentler piece now at The Bushwick Starr through November 15. Cale’s extraordinary monologue traces his brief love affair with a mysterious ranch hand while visiting Ketchum, Idaho to research a film script. Cale is an expert storyteller, and veteran director Les Waters guides this deeply moving piece with a typically light touch. Aiding the storytelling is an elegant set by Colleen Murray, and subtly evocative lighting design by Mextly Couzin.

As with Goodman’s piece, Cale’s text has a refreshing sexual frankness. Like Stachel, he is admirably honest about his own emotional failings, and moments of immaturity. And like Kim, Cale refuses to allow too easy of an emotional catharsis.

The dog does arrive a bit earlier, though. And that’s nice. It’s always nice to have a dog.

Queens, Martyna Majok’s revision of her 2018 play of the same name, opened tonight in a mesmerizing new production with an embarrassment of character-actress riches: Brooke Bloom, Anna Chlumsky, Sharlene Cruz, Marin Ireland, Julia Lester, Nadine Malouf, Andrea Syglowski and Nicole Villamil.

Majok’s expansive work lives up to their talents, and allows each of them to shine, capturing two moments (2001 and 2017) at an overcrowded basement apartment in the titular New York borough. The women making do with their exploitative-but-what-can-you-do situation are all from Ukraine, Honduras, Afghanistan and Poland, either striving towards financial independence or temporarily in the country to send money (or wayward relatives) back home. The particulars of their situations are both immaterial to critical analysis and completely the point; a compendium of the world’s ails that drive people to migrate, and which drive the disenfranchised to build strong communities – well, almost always.

The boldness of Majok’s proposition here is to challenge the ways the powerless can sell each other out. America, as it sometimes likes to remind itself, is a nation of immigrants, but they haven’t only been good to, or for, each other. Queens is blistering in exploding that campaign trail truism. This is no reactionist screed, though; Majok’s righteous politics are evident both in the play’s ethos and in the care she invests into all of these women and their backstories. But – and maybe I’m projecting – the ardor of its searing insight stems from an exhaustion with immigrant double-consciousness, further aggravated when your people, ostensibly seeking progress, court regressive actions. That the onus of moral rot in the play is relegated to some of its Polish characters (Majok’s native country) feels like a pointed missive: it’s no longer just Americans’ bootstraps, but immigrants’ ladders, that are being pulled up behind them.

The production has a slight metaphysical bent, mainly during scene transitions or to tie the women together beyond their literal shared space, that feels slightly put-on, but the rest of Trip Cullman’s staging for Manhattan Theatre Club is dually attentive to his many characters’ interiorities as well as to an audience which spends nearly three hours in a single, not particularly attractive, set. (That’s no diss on Marsha Ginsberg’s scenic design which, aided by Ben Stanton’s haunting lighting, closes out the first of the play’s two acts on a striking note.)

Amid an ensemble of sterling work, Chlumsky’s brief first appearance stands out for its sheer fire. She speaks a language most in the audience won’t understand, but her meaning is clear. Ditto the reaction she engenders from Ireland, who achieves something like a silent scream: unthinkable, impenetrable, universal.

Queens is in performance through November 30, 2025 at New York City Center Stage I on West 55th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

Looks like North America is about to get a little versatility. Today, it was announced that BOOP! The Musical will launch a 50-week tour in Rochester, NY at the West Herr Auditorium Theatre in Fall 2026. 

Additional tour cities, dates, and casting for the North American Tour will be announced soon. The tour of BOOP! is produced by NETworks Presentations and booking is by The Booking Group.

Tony-winning director/choreographer Jerry Mitchell brings the Queen of the Screen to the theater in BOOP!, with celebrated multiple Grammy -winning composer David Foster, Tony-nominated lyricist Susan Birkenhead and Tony-winning book writer Bob Martin. 

For almost a century, Betty Boop, created by animation pioneer Max Fleischer, has won hearts and inspired fans around the world with her trademark looks, voice, and style. Now, in BOOP!, Betty's dream of an ordinary day off from the super-celebrity in her black-and-white world leads to an extraordinary adventure of color, music, and finding love in New York City — one that reminds her and the world, “You are capable of amazing things.” 

The design and creative team for BOOP! includes Tony Award-winner David Rockwell scenic design; Three-time Tony Award-winner Gregg Barnes, costume design; Philip S. Rosenberg, lighting design; Tony Award-winnerGareth Owen, sound design; Tony Award-winner Finn Ross, projection design; Emmy Award-winner Sabana Majeed, hair and wig design; Michael Clifton, makeup design; OBIE Award-winner Skylar Fox, illusions design; The Huber Marionettes, marionette design; Tony Award-winner Daryl Waters, music supervision and arrangements; Three-time Tony Award-winner Doug Besterman, Orchestrations; Rick Fox, music director; and Tony Award^®-nominee Zane Mark, dance music arrangements. Casting is by The TRC Company, DB Bonds is Associate Director and Rachelle Rak is Associate Choreographer.