Under the Radar 2025

“I love you and I hate you,” an audience member angrily told destabilizing performer and theatermaker Ann Liv Young, who rumbles the tectonic plates at the foundation of the typical assumed relationship between artist and audience. This confrontation (I think Young had just called the audience member a “piece of shit”) took place mid-show at a warehouse-like venue deep in Bushwick, home of Young’s Marie Antoinette (Chemistry Creative), one of over 30 productions at this year’s Under the Radar Festival.

There’s no question that in the two years since Under the Radar decoupled from the Public Theater, its producer of nearly 20 years, the programming has grown riskier, more boundary-crossing, more possible to love and hate at the same time. The audience member had interrupted the show to interrogate Young about an offensive improvisation from a previous performance that he had heard about from a friend. This is just the kind of standoff that Young invites—and seems to always conquer—but Marie Antoinette has an extra level of volatility.

Young is joined on stage by a pair of talented amateur performers, Alex Sabina and Tom Ruth, whom she introduces as severely mentally ill and whom she “directs,” often hurling caustic criticism at them as they act out bizarre scenarios together. She encourages them to express themselves with unfiltered pugnacity as she does, egging them on to join her in tense, sometimes scary encounters with individual audience members.

It’s the kind of show that might be fascinating to watch from a great distance, like maybe on YouTube. Being visible to the audience-ambushing Young during Marie Antoinette, though, is rather terrifying—as a critic, I timidly refrained from taking notes—especially because the rules of audience engagement and the structures in place to protect performers and audience members from actual risk are so unclear. One actor with a traumatic brain injury needed to take a break because the strong lights, he said, have been causing him headaches; an audience member burst into tears and another was accidentally hit in the back of the head during a scene in which performers and audiences hurl large lumps of dough across the venue.

There might be something going on here about forcing us to confront our fears around mentally ill performers in real time. But Young herself takes on a cruel ringmaster-director persona, the lines of reality and fiction blurring as she asks audience members whether they perceive her behavior as abusive. There’s an ever-present anxiety about whether the performers are actually taken care of in this process and whether it’s ethical for Young to ask an audience to take her word for it that her actors are entirely autonomous and in safe hands.

Radical safety, on the other hand, abounds in The Dan Daw Show (Performance Space New York), a U.K. import featuring the titular disabled performer enacting a series of kink experiences with his collaborator Thomas Gülgeç. “No shame, no judgment, none of that bullshit here,” Daw explains at the outset. He wants audiences to see his desire to be dominated as playful and liberating, but he also wants there to be no question that he’s always in control and that there’s absolute trust between him and his co-performer.

It helps that the piece is fully supertitled, so it’s clear that every interaction is precisely scripted, even such tense moments as Daw entering a tank slowly deprived of oxygen until his body, except for his head, becomes tightly wrapped in latex. The Dan Daw Show recalls a 2020 Under the Radar show, The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes, that gleefully set traps for the audience to grapple with assumptions about the capacities of neurodivergent performers. Here, Daw has us confront our hesitancy in ascribing full autonomy to a disabled artist—especially one choosing to be ordered around and sometimes used as a footstool—but then lovingly, laughingly reassures us of his artistic self-determination: “This is exactly how I want you to see me.”

Upending audience expectations is also at the heart of the Palestinian artist Alaa Shehada’s The Horse of Jenin (La MaMa). Shehada, who also appeared in the festival’s Grey Rock in 2020, highlights early on the difficulty of performing outside of Palestine when “my standup comedy has turned into interesting comedy.” Are we allowed to just laugh? It’s tempting, since Shehada is an extremely funny, appealing presence, especially skilled at physical mimicry of the inhabitants of Jenin, a city in the West Bank, as he charts his childhood and discovery of performance.

At first, the piece strives to detach our vision of Palestinian lives from the omnipresence of war. After all, Palestinian kids are still kids. In a particularly amusing bit, Shehada imagines a TV anchor eagerly interviewing a boy who’s frenziedly searching through the rubble about what he’s seeking. And when the boy reveals that he’s hoping to find a PlayStation, not a missing family member, the reporter disgruntledly exclaims, “That’s not the story we’re looking for!”

But as the story creeps closer to the present, the piece takes an extraordinary turn toward a bleaker reality. Much as a Palestinian comedian would love to just be funny, to avoid interesting comedy altogether, that’s not possible, not now and not in Shehada’s lifetime so far. We can’t look at the kid combing through the rubble for a PlayStation and not notice the rubble too.

Letting kids be kids is at the heart of SpaceBridge (La MaMa), a piece collaboratively devised and performed by 11 Russian political refugees and nine American students, all under the age of 15. Through workshops led by Irina Kruzhilina, the kids learned each others’ stories and found common ground, ultimately generating a theatrical piece that advocates against the war in Ukraine and pushes back against anti-Russian bullying.

SpaceBridge is occasionally very moving, namely when the kids speak of how their lives are in limbo, given that their refugee families are still awaiting their asylum hearings. But Kruzhilina could stand to slim the show down to these genuine testimonies from this charming collection of budding performers. For one, nothing is gained from the distracting device of an adult actor playing Samantha Smith, “America’s Youngest Ambassador” who promoted peaceful American-Russian relations before her death in a 1985 airplane crash at age 13.

When this year’s Under the Radar offerings aren’t challenging audiences—both gently and ferociously—the shows tip toward the mesmeric. Several of the shorter works this season feature tremendous displays of craft—photography, video, live music looping, and dance—even if they’re not entirely compelling when they stretch between 45 and 90 minutes.

That’s the case for Find Your Eyes (Iris Cantor Theatre), in which artist Benji Reid poses three models in a surrealist photography session. The photos he snaps, projected for us in real time, are fairly wondrous, like one of a dancer with yellow wings floating upside down surrounded by billowing red haze. But at over an hour and a half, this liquid-like mixture of experimental photography with experimental theater deprives Reid’s push for deeper meaning—a voiceover suggests this is a piece about Black bodies going unseen—of a solid place to land.

Originally designed as a virtual performance for Theater in Quarantine and running through January 26, The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy [redux] (New York Theater Workshop) also demonstrates masterful craftwork. As the titular astronaut, Joshua William Gelb scrambles all over a tiny green-screen playing space, with projected videos allowing him to interact with a growing number of Egon Tichy clones who overtake a time-traveling spaceship. Meticulous camera placement and ingenious staging make for an initially jaw-dropping experience, even if the slapstick-y plotline centered around the time-travel paradox overstays its welcome.

Two dance-based shows, My Body, My Archive (New York Live Arts) and Temporary Boyfriend (The Chocolate Factory Theater), straddle the thin line in performance art between the deliberately enigmatic and the unintentionally inscrutable. In the former, Faustin Linyekula sometimes seems to vibrate at an impossible tempo, accompanied by a live trumpeter standing off to the side. With increasingly frenetic movement and intense lighting, Linyekula arranges and rearranges a series of sculptures, representing, it seems from the fleeting moments of spoken text, his female Congolese ancestors whose stories are missing from family lore.

In Temporary Boyfriend, Nile Harris, whose 2024 show this house is not a home was one of the season’s more uncomfortable ones, opts for something gentler this time around. This show opens with Harris’s co-star Malcolm-x Betts wordlessly riding a CitiBike through the theater before picking up the bike and almost waltzing with it. As Harris holds the bike in place, Betts tenderly, erotically mounts it. It’s a strange and beautiful sight, emotionally clearer in its connection to the fragility of Black queer desire than the improvisational dance that follows.

Mesmerizing visuals pay off entirely, though, in the utterly gorgeous Dead as a Dodo (Baruch Performing Arts Center), an existential puppetry musical from the company Wakka Wakka running through February 9. A boy and his best friend, a dodo, are wandering the underworld hunting for bones, as the boy needs a new leg. They are, after all, skeletons. When the dodo begins to sprout feathers, they find their friendships at a crossroads, with the boy disappearing into some sort of unknown eternity as the dodo begins to resurrect.

Weighty themes, perhaps, but they’re buoyantly set aloft by the whimsical work of eight puppeteers, a delicious collection of songs by Thor Gunnar Thorvaldsson, and a stunning landscape of projections that bring the underworld, well, to life. Dead as a Dodo thrives in its detail, from the quivering sadness in the boy’s smile to the precise coordination of the ensemble all dressed as glittering basalt. A more wondrous, witty world, one that should capture child and grown-up imaginations alike, will be hard to come by on a New York stage these days.

There’s also lots of playfulness to Project Nyx’s adaptation of Terayama Shûji’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (Japan Society), an example of the angura (“underground”) theater movement rooted in fantasy and the subversion of linearity. In this production, the actress Fujita Rei plays an actress who shares her name, who’s arrived at a theater to play Bluebeard’s seventh wife, and also to find out what happened to her missing brother, a stagehand.

The back-stage and on-stage worlds intermix, to alternatingly amusing and bewildering effect, with each of Bluebeard’s wives earning solo showpieces: dramatic scenes, aerial dance, musical numbers (including, most strangely and fully in English, the signature Kristin Chenoweth number “The Girl in 14G”). Eventually, the show’s logic folds in on itself one too many times to maintain focus. But at a festival where it’s sometimes hard to judge whether an international theater piece’s impenetrability stems from its content or some cultural gulf, it’s something of a relief to know that Japanese audiences would also find Duke Bluebeard’s Castle just as weird.

Target Margin Theater takes the festival’s biggest, weirdest swing at a classic work in Show/Boat: A River (NYU Skirball), an alluringly misguided adaptation of Show Boat, the game-changing dramatic musical by Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern. Artistic Director David Herskovits is right that you can’t do Show Boat exactly as written without addressing the complexity of its treatment of Black characters. Yes, there are cringey stereotypes, uncomfortable vernacular, unrealized multi-dimensionality of characters like Joe, the dock worker who sings “Ol’ Man River.” But Herskovits’s messy approach to presenting the material, which entered the public domain in 2023, suggests that Show Boat as written may be more baldly racist, more overtly problematic to perform, and more easy to dismiss than it actually is.

Take, for example, the song “In Dahomey” early in the second act, in which a group of performing Africans are on exhibit at the Chicago World’s Fair. Here, Herskovits interpolates a traditional Zulu song for five Black cast members before having the white characters, looking on, sing the made-up African dialect that appears in the original score.

It seems like a moving intervention, a reminder of the humanity and rich musical tradition of exploited Africans that Show Boat steamrolled over in 1927. But that’s not the case at all. In the original scene, it’s revealed after the white audience leaves that the performers are in fact Black New Yorkers faking an African identity because they know the onlookers won’t know the difference. And that’s a completely different but comparably anti-racist intention.

Herskovits’s approaches to reimagining the show range from the overly on the nose to the totally incoherent. So that actors of color can appear legibly as white characters, performers wear beauty pageant sashes in the first act reading “White.” Entrances and exits take place through racially segregated doors. It’s heavy-handed, sure, but Show Boat has always been about, though seldom so centrally, the social construction of racial labels. That Julie (Stephanie Weeks) loses her sash as soon as someone points a finger at her and questions the purity of her whiteness both highlights and unnecessarily reiterates the point of the original script. More bewildering, Parthy (J. Molière and also occasionally Suzanne Darrell) is sometimes but not always played by two actors speaking at the same time.

Still, the score shimmers in a quirky orchestration from Dan Schlosberg that foregrounds the clarinet, under the baton of Dionne McClain-Freeney. Weeks’s Julie and Rebekah Vega-Romero’s Magnolia overcome Herskovits’s chaotic choices to find genuine heart in their portrayals. Philip Themio Stoddard as Ravenal and Alvin Crawford as Joe sound especially gorgeous, respectively, on “You Are Love” and “Ol’ Man River.” And Caitlin Nasema Cassidy joyously offers the closest thing to a traditional Show Boat performance as the feisty Ellie.

It’s possible that the emotional arc of Show Boat ultimately peeks through not just in spite of the confusing revisions of this production, but, in some small part, because of them. By doing so much of the intellectual labor for us, clearing the brush of racial complication by any means necessary, Show/Boat: A River allows us to just enjoy the music.

But we could stand to work a little harder. Though Show/Boat: A River, which runs through January 26, won’t make any of this nuance apparent, Show Boat is most interesting now as a study of what it meant for a socially conscious white impresario—Hammerstein—to write a show about race a century ago. How do we simultaneously recognize that progressive intent while also holding our theatrical ancestors accountable for their failures to go further? To circle back to that enraged audience member at Marie Antoinette, might it be best not to pass easy judgment but to sit in our discomfort, to confront how it might be that we hate it and we love it?