Didn’t we just do lists? Year-end ones to honor 2025 theater? We sure did, we all did—so what’s one more?
January is a flush month in New York theater as festivals import or give a leg up to some of the experimental scene’s most curious artists. That’s a superlative right there, and ten more will follow—for the first time, the Brooklyn Rail is celebrating the end of festival season with crowd-sourced honorifics, brought to you by the people, for the people (who experience a subniche of New York live performance). These superlatives uplift specific moments from shows, so it’s about to get very inside baseball, but if you caught some productions, you know. If you didn’t, let this warm bath of wackadoo wash over you, and perhaps entice you to check out such bold performances next season. This year, many were sold out, new venues were anointed, and their subversive communities only got fiercer.
Best Diaper at the Disco
Friday Night Rat Catchers, Under the Radar
Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein’s Friday Night Rat Catchers isn’t afraid to be all over the place. The choreography in this gleeful piece of dance-theater ranges from John Travolta disco points to a diaper-clad Fagan marching around stage like a toddler. Following a New York Live Arts run in 2025, this version features a revised role for plasticky game show host Marianne Rendón. It has gotten, improbably, even wilder. The creators know, however, that experimentation all too-often comes at the expense of the audience: the show, as fun as it is absurd, always lets us in on the joke.
Most Booked and Blessed
Pete Simpson in Godbird and Fashion, Exponential Festival
Seasons change, empires fall, but if there’s one thing New York City theatergoers can count on, it’s death, taxes, and protean downtown darling Pete Simpson enlivening an experimental work. This festival season, Simpson featured in two shows almost simultaneously: as a befeathered park dweller in Nurit Chinn’s existential meet-cute Godbird and a regimented swimmer in Amanda Horowitz’s ever-evolving Fashion. Dayenu!
—Ethan Karas
Fishiest (Complimentary)
Time Passes (for Ellen Brody) and i’m going to take my pants off now, Exponential Festival
It was a big year for big fish at Exponential Festival. Our two scene-stealers from this category are the oft-Instagrammed inflatable shark from the Goat Exchange’s Time Passes and the very elegant, very demure cod from Ann Marie Dorr’s i’m going to take my pants off now. One can only wonder what will become of these hefty swimmers now that their respective shows have ended. Perhaps they will be sent back to sea.
—Leah Plante-Wiener
Most Active Fourth Wall
The Visitors, Under the Radar
In Jane Harrison’s The Visitors, what lies beyond the fourth wall drives the play’s conflict. As a tribal council debates whether to greet or attack newcomers arriving from a foreign shore, sound design signals the colonizers’ presence and actions. Throughout, the tribe looks out at the audience, wondering what newness lingers on the horizon. In the end, when the visitors arrive, the audience, as the fourth wall, becomes the visitors. We are the outsiders watching and judging the locals. When the lights come up and the fourth wall fades, I wrestled with my own role as a “visitor.”
—Carmi Burbridge
That’s An Audience Plant???
Julyana Soelistyo in my utopias, Exponential Festival
It can be a hokey or unconvincing device, but when Julyana Soelistyo got up from her seat and bolted for the door toward the end of Jay Stull’s my utopias, it felt pretty real, as did the ensuing conversation out in the hallway between her and Van (Jon Norman Schneider). Soelistyo deftly navigated the line between reality and performance as the play’s sense of what’s real continued to warp, with the character (or the actor?) eventually seeking a different objective and new lines to deliver.