WEDNESDAY
(image via Lorene Bouboushian / Facebook)
This Is It
Wednesday, September 26 at The Glove, 8:30 pm: $8
If you were planning on going to a show tonight and being rowdy and inattentive, I’d advise you not to come to The Glove. “I will pick you up and slide you down the stairs if you are shitty,” notes Lorene Bouboushian, the host for the evening of performance art, and you’d best heed their warning. So, get your respectful and enthusiastic self to Bushwick to see some weird and wonderful work by noise-drag performer Reagan Holiday, queer Latinx performance artist Sierra Ortega, multidisciplinary artist Rina Espiritu, and a butt-tastic collaboration between Lily Chambers and Hannah Kallenbach.
THURSDAY
(image via Performance Space New York / Facebook)
The Slow Room
September 27-29 at Performance Space New York, 7 pm (Saturday at 2 pm and 7 pm): $25
One of the defining facets of theater is the fact that it involves collaboration with a bunch of other human beings. The work of Annie Dorsen subverts this a bit, and no, it’s not yet another one-person show. The Slow Room, along with Dorsen’s past work, involves treating machines, algorithms, and the like as “full creative partners.” Of course, there’s still human designers, dramaturgs, producers, and so on, but the work couldn’t fully exist without an additional technological component. Fittingly, this show “explore[s] the uncertain space where the virtual meets the embodied.”
FRIDAY
(image courtesy of Ars Nova)
Rags Parkland Sings The Songs of the Future
Now through October 27 at Ars Nova, various times: $20-65
Most of the reasons Elon Musk has been in the news lately concern his increasingly unhinged tweets, his relationship with musician Grimes (and drop-ins by Azealia Banks), and that time he (poorly) smoked a blunt while on the radio or something. But lest we forget, dear Elon also wants to colonize Mars. He’s not the only one—Goldman Sachs has done studies on why investors should put their money toward a space economy. The rich migrating to another planet doesn’t exactly bode well for anyone else’s future, which Andrew Butler’s new sic-fi-folk musical Rags Parkland Sings The Songs of the Future takes a bit of a look at. Set in the future where Mars plays host to “forced labor camps,” humans are made in labs, and a group of people are trying to rebel, a musician plays a concert commemorating those who continue to resist.
SATURDAY
(image via Hypokrit Theater Company / Facebook)
R+J
September 27 through October 14 at Access Theater, 8 pm (10/14 at 5 pm): $30+
You don’t have to look hard to find any type of show that bills itself as Shakespeare, except mixed-up in some kind of way. Not all of these are good, mind you, but some pique one’s interest more than others. This queer, feminist reimagining of the classic high school theater staple Romeo and Juliet, presented by Hypokrit Theater Company, stages the show “in a not-too-distant future in a society that has been purged of cisgender men,” in which the two rival families Romeo and Juliet belong to are powerful factions in a sovereign state. Sound dystopian enough for you?
