Now Playing at La MaMa Theatres
Protest Song – December 4-21
David Nellist stars in Protest Song by Tim Price—a raw, urgent, darkly funny portrait of a homeless man caught in the Occupy London movement.
Oklahoma Samovar – December 5-21
Oklahoma Samovar celebrates the American immigrant experience by examining the shifting identity, traditions, and culture clashes that shape five generations of a Jewish family.
Birth + Carnage – December 19-21
Birth + Carnage, a work by Marla Phelan, merges choreography and astrophysics– transforming computational simulations of stellar birth into visceral metaphor, digital landscape, and choreographic framework.
LA MAMA POETRY ELECTRIC: POETRY FOR JUSTICE – December 22
The Poetry Electric fuses music, movement, sound, and dance with the spoken word and presents artists working in a wide range of styles including beatboxing, jazz and hip-hop theatre. This series has presented over 200 emerging poets from diverse cultural backgrounds.
Christmas In Nickyland – December 22-23
What does it mean to return in 2025 and come together once again to celebrate during this particular holiday season? We must find ways to work together to protect democracy, while continuing to work on ceasing the never-ending battles and wars that nations wage against each other. As the ever-changing world we live in continues to challenge us both as individuals and within our different communities, we can use this year-end holiday time to reflect, heal, find solace as we celebrate together. Joy, hope and love to this world!
The Ford/Hill Project – January 7-11
30 years apart, Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford provoked a reckoning about who is given the power to shape the future of our country by telling the story of one of the most private moments of their lives in one of the most public settings imaginable. With an ensemble of four actors speaking from the verbatim transcripts of these pivotal hearings, these two women’s stories can be seen side by side in a new light in Waterwell’s illuminating production.
The Rest Of Our Lives – January 7-17
Hopefully hopeful, The Rest of Our Lives is a joyful dose of dance, theatre, circus and games. A cabaret of life and near death. Two middle-aged lives in an eclectic, spontaneous, predictable and random decline. Jo is an old dancer, George an old clown. International artists with over 100 years of life experience between them, armed with a soundtrack of floor-fillers, a book of raffle tickets and a sprinkling of eco-friendly optimism. Joyful, celebratory and hilarious. The struggle is real. It’s the beginning of the end. But we’re still here.
PRECIPICE – January 8 – 11
PRECIPICE sets an intimate story of a young woman’s struggle in the epic landscape of America’s mountain west. Like the land around her, her wild spirit is crushed by disregard. She escapes to the precipice and leaps, awakening mute in a wilderness in which she must fight to find her voice. The opera’s visual world is evoked by miniature dioramas and large-scale video. The score, inspired by American folk music, art song, and the sounds of nature, features seven singers, string quintet, piano and mandolin. By drawing parallels between environmental and emotional damage, PRECIPICE looks at how we are silenced and exiled, and how we find our way to connection, both with each other and the natural world.
La MaMa Kids: Don Quixote Takes New York – January 9-11
La MaMa Kids: The Sweet Tales of Piloncillo and Tejocote
/ Adventures in the Mexican Candy Factory.
An endearing puppet show about brotherhood, friendship, and sweet treats.
12 Last Songs – January 17
12 Last Songs is part live exhibition, part epic performance. It’s about work and how we spend our time. Making a living. Finding your passion. Watching the clock. From midday to midnight on Saturday, January 17, real workers from New York City will perform paid shifts on stage, in front of a live audience. There are no actors. A builder might build a wall, a hairdresser might cut someone’s hair, a chef might prepare a meal. We’ll find out what they do, and how they see themselves in the world…
KING LEAR – January 23-February 8
Compagnia de’ Colombari’s KING LEAR is a primal, physical, and potent “paper crown” Lear that strips the Shakespearian classic to its essence. Coonrod utilizes her signature “multiplicity” to shift and deepen audiences’ connection with the characters.
H.T. Chen & Dancers – January 30-February 1
Ring in the Lunar New Year of the Horse with H.T. Chen & Dancers. Teahouse Performances include a celebration of and reflection on the Chinese in the Americas through dance.
La MaMa Kids: We Are So Happy You Are Here – January 31- February 1
Step into a world of dance, theatre, and music—designed for children 3+ and the grown-ups who love them.
A performance created for you and every real or imaginary being you might bring. Friends, families, newcomers… everyone belongs here.
Kim Ima is a theater maker, writer, baker and community events enthusiast. Longtime member of the Great Jones Rep. She is the author of the cookbook, The Treats Truck Baking Book, published by HarperCollins.
The First Line of Dante’s Inferno – February 5-22
The First Line of Dante’s Inferno is a wild, feral trip into nature. Ann Espinoza marches deep into a state forest looking for her missing sister, and finds herself.
“Mia M.I.A.” a shadow puppet musical – February 5-15
“Mia M.I.A.” is a science fiction fairytale about grief, love, the role of imagination in healing, and the transformative power of embracing the shadows.
MANO A MANO: an operatic monodrama – February 12-22
An operatic monodrama of virtuosic chants, rants, songs and spectacle, surveying toxic masculinity through the ages by needling Anglo-Saxon epics with personal anecdote and pseudo-history.
Paul Pinto is a writer, composer, performer, opera-sermonizer, and multi-disciplinary dabbler. Kristin Marting is an award-winning director and writer of hybrid performance
Dave & Golly a tale of virtual loneliness – February 26-March 8
Ring in the Lunar New Year of the Horse with H.T. Chen & Dancers. Teahouse Performances include a celebration of and reflection on the Chinese in the Americas through dance.
The Thousand and One Nights Workshop – February 19-March 1
To escape execution by a vengeful king, Scheherazade, the most brilliant storyteller in the world, weaves a tapestry of tales for a thousand and one nights, each story buying her another dawn.
Footnotes – February 27 – March 15
FOOTNOTES is an immersive puppetry performance takes place in four
distinct locations and examines the theme of walking….……its history, its science,
its political power, its poetic and spiritual dimensions.
Jane Comfort and Company – March 19 -22
The evening includes a premiere with music by MacArthur Award winning composer Heather Christian, plus the 1983 Afro Brazilian work Artificial Horizon with live drumming, and Bites, from 1996.
Jane Comfort has been making multi-disciplinary work for her company since 1978 and has won major accolades, including two Bessie Awards, a Guggenheim, and American Dance Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Antigone in Analysis – March 20 -April 5
Sophocles’ tragedy is reimagined with a metaphysical twist: a chorus of historical philosophers elevates Jocasta to the throne, squaring off with Antigone in a mother-daughter throwdown.
Company:
Peculiar Works Project has created and produced indie theater in NYC since 1993, presenting compelling stories that examine our current moment with complexity and originality.
Spider Rabbit – March 26-April 12
Dan Safer and Tony Torn made the wildly acclaimed “Ubu Sings Ubu”. They have been referred to as “Off Off Broadway luminaries” by the New York Times but have not won any awards.
Uncle Vanya, scenes from country life – March 28 – April 12
Krymov has never staged “Uncle Vanya”
But now—as our own world burns with despair, longing, and betrayal—it is time for the Lab to take up Chekhov’s masterpiece, transforming it into a grotesque elegy, a wasteland vaudeville.
Krymov Lab NYC develops bold, experimental, design-forward theater under the leadership of Dmitry Krymov, “one of the world’s finest theater-makers.” (The New York Times)
The Door Slams, A Glass Trembles – April 24- March 10
The dining room of a sanatorium in the Alps. The deck of a ship on it’s way to Egypt. A country home in the Northeast. An uprooted family. An accidental death. Time elongates, compresses, becomes disjointed, and layers events past, present and imagined.
Combining richly textured music-theater with striking visual imagery, Talking Band’s elegant, eloquent, profound performance work has for fifty years been a cornerstone of New York City’s avant-guard theater community. Recipient of 18 OBIE awards including Life Time Achievement awards for its founders Ellen Maddow, Tina Shepard, and Paul Zimet.
Memory Generation – May 2-10
A new interactive, experiential theater work that explores the challenges, moments of humor, and unexpected losses and victories that arise when dementia impacts individuals, families, and communities.
Memory Generation is part of the first year of Pink Fang (formerly Ping Chong and Company), a home for daring experimentation, expanding the boundaries of theater and nurturing creative communities of care.
Take Me To Dollywood – May 14-31
Take Me to Dollywood offers a full-length collage of scenes and experiments with a queer southern twang. On a porch in the south, A faceless Dolly Parton haunts the stage as characters find themselves on the edge of relationships, sexuality, and reality. A woman has eaten her hand, a sexy gummy bear awaits certain death, two men meet for a hook-up, a boss rummages through his employees’ desks, and the playwright details his sex life.
McManus: Fall of a Tyrant – May 14-17
A Nitwit son, A Revolutionary Daughter, Not-too-butch-for-primetime Generals, A Put-upon Wife, Exhausted Servants, Air-filled-Lovers, and Mad-As-Hell-Citizenry threaten to tear down the palace of McManus (King of all he surveys in-his-boxer-shorts). Randy Neale’s McManus: Fall of a Tyrant is a scathingly funny socio-political satire hell bent on “giving” (as the kids say) some catharsis to those damn beleaguered lefties!
The Life and Times of Daisy Forbes – May 21-24
The Life and Times of Daisy Forbes is a long-form lip-sync illustrating a show girl, our last show girl who is at a distinct crossroads in her life. A crossroads where she is forced to make the decision of whether or not to continue pushing the rock up the hill as a performer and human being in this world. Via TV interviews, trashy pop, obscure musical theater scores and film scenes, Daisy channels these voices as a means of excavating the choices she has made, the feeling of abandonment and the uncertain future ahead.
Lucky FM 2 – May 28-31
Riding on the huge success of Lucky FM at La MaMa E.T.C. last season, Slant returns to The Club to dig deeper into the liminal space between past and present with Lucky FM 2. Through the underground radio station’s telethon portal, Slant journeys through AANHPI histories with bamboo flutes, drums, and guitars telling stories of the Japanese American concentration camps, the International Hotel, Vincent Chin, and today. Performed viscerally through music, dance, drama, and humor, Slant finds unity amidst chaos in a celebration of community.
The Last Play In Gaza – June 11-21
In “The Last Play in Gaza” two actors attempt to reconstruct The Emigrants by Sławomir Mrożek, performed in Gaza just before the war. Genocide testimonies punctuate their work as they confront erasure and exile.
