UNDER THE RADAR Unveils Highlights of 2027 Programming
Highlights include work from Morgan Bassichis, Suzanne Bocanegra, Satoko Ichihara, and more.
Under the Radar has revealed highlights of its 22nd festival. This glimpse at what will ultimately be a collection of more than 30 distinct works previews the staggering range of visions and perspectives from New York and around the world converging across the city for Under the Radar 2027. The dynamic festival interlinks many of the city’s one-of-a-kind cultural organizations and sites of visionary performance, with these highlights taking place in a legendary cabaret, a vital community center, a converted 1870s munitions storage warehouse on Governors Island, and more.
This year, Janet Wong, who served as Associate Artistic Director of New York Live Arts and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company for nearly three decades, and Obie Award-winning performing artist and UTR Under Construction alum Jenn Kidwell have taken on the artistic leadership roles of Co-Creative Directors. They pick up the mantle of Kaneza Schaal and Meropi Peponides, and collaborate with founder Mark Russell, continuing a new model that keeps the pluralistic experimental festival vital and adaptive. The festival is produced by Thomas O. Kriegsmann and Sarah [Rah] Bellin of ArKtype.
Across the 2027 festival’s works, audiences will find themselves seeing anew (and in some cases, stepping directly into) the wonders and troubles of our world through the lenses of daring artists: whether in the entirety of a recent-historic activist meeting resurrected by audience-participants; one of today’s most commanding performers approaching the work of Amy Winehouse; or a noh theatrical tale twisted into an uncompromising look at human desire and violence broadcast onto puppets.
Highlights include:
World premiere of Minor Theater’s Pity Whore, by Obie Award-winning playwright Julia Jarcho, wildly reconsidering John Ford’s 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, presented by NYU Skirball, January 13-16
Morgan Bassichis: In Concert with Amy Winehouse, presented by Joe’s Pub on the stage where Winehouse made her US debut in 2007. Morgan recently celebrated for Can I Be Frank—takes on Winehouse’s monumental legacy, January 13-17
Angelic Architectures, a dance play from Symara Sarai, one of Dance Magazine’s 2025 “Top 25 to Watch,” developed by Sarai during their Abrons Performance AIRspace residency and presented by Abrons Arts Center, January 13 - 23
Honor, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Lili Taylor, expanding in myriad directions from the 16th-century Dutch masterpiece tapestry titled Honor; starring Lili Taylor, directed by Geoff Sobelle, and presented by Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA), January 13-31 (with UTR: January 13-24) at Polonsky Shakespeare Center
Yoroboshi, the comic and brutal puppet work from Satoko Ichihara, in the internationally acclaimed theater-maker’s American debut, presented by Japan Society, January 14–16
The Mushroom, Normandy Sherwood and Nikki Calonge immerse audiences in a micro view of the forest floor, presented by LMCC (Lower Manhattan Cultural Council) and New Georges at The Arts Center at Governors Island, January 15-31 (with UTR: January 15-24)
Philippe Quesne’s Le Paradoxe de John [John’s Paradox], the Obie-winning director’s latest intimate, funny and tenderly absurd work about a tight community of friends, forming a diptych with his 2007 play L'Effet de Serge which made its U.S. premiere at Under the Radar in 2010; presented by L’Alliance New York, January 18-22
Fight Back, David Wise’s participatory theatrical experiment with no performers and no audience, inviting participants to recreate a 1989 ACT UP meeting; produced by Benson Drive Productions (George Strus, CEO) and presented at Presented at The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center (The Center) and Additional Venues TBA, Dates TBA
Jenn Kidwell and Janet Wong said, “The mayor's Muslim, the bagel's Jewish, the Christian's Dior, and the Knicks won in 5... but the epicenter of wild idiosyncrasy is the Under the Radar Festival. We're thrilled to share another season of radical, risky, boundary-pushing performance borne of the dynamic complexities that are our world right now.”
Mark Russell added, “Despite this ridiculous environment of cultural cuts and repression facing the arts today, Under the Radar does what it always does—find the abundant live theater that thrives in all the many corners of New York and give it an international platform. New York’s febrile artistic resistance gives me hope for the future.”
Under the Radar, founded in 2005 and transformed into a citywide festival beginning in 2024, gathers artists, audiences, and theater industry experts around a thrilling array of contemporary performances shaped by fearless experimentation. As America shuts so many doors, it is a powerful site of welcome for new perspectives from abroad in conversation with bold work being created in the U.S. Now a producer and commissioner as well as a presenter, it is an invitation into invention for national and International Artists, and a proposition for audiences to encounter singular artistic visions and step into new points of view.
Under the Radar 2027 Highlights Descriptions
Minor Theater: Pity Whore
World Premiere
January 13–16
NYU Skirball
Julia Jarcho takes classic Jacobean shocker 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and runs it straight into the present. Annie waits tables at the Cheesecake Factory while her brother’s away at school; their mom is kind of a slut. Annie’s cute, Gio’s sad, and when she goes up to visit him at college, longing and tenderness tip toward the unthinkable and the grotesque, all laced with humor from somewhere unhinged. Jarcho, an Obie winner and one of the most unclassifiable voices in American playwriting, has never once written the expected play. For her NYU Skirball premiere, she teams up with director Kedian Keohan (Rocky Horror Show) to make something sexy, savage, funny, and fully alive: a tragedy that knows precisely where it is going.
Morgan Bassichis Plays Amy Winehouse
Morgan Bassichis
Joe’s Pub
January 13 - 17
As the first-ever gay person to do a tribute show for a woman singer, comedian Morgan Bassichis revisits Amy Winehouse’s legendary concert at Joe’s Pub in 2007, her first performance in the US. Accompanied by a powerhouse ensemble, Bassichis will sing Winehouse’s set from that fateful night. What could go wrong?
Honor, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra Starring Lili Taylor
Conceived, written and performed by Suzanne Bocanegra
Starring Lili Taylor
Directed by Geoff Sobelle
Theatre for a New Audience
January 13-31 (with UTR: January 13-24) at Polonsky Shakespeare Center
How do we determine what’s honorable, and what’s not? In 2022, the Metropolitan Museum of Art invited performance artist Suzanne Bocanegra to create a work about the largest tapestry in their collection: a 16th-century Dutch masterpiece titled Honor. The result, directed by Geoff Sobelle, is a slyly witty hour-long performance impossible to categorize. Performing in tandem with acclaimed actress Lili Taylor, Bocanegra weaves concepts of ownership, authenticity, cruelty, and feminism together with personal and collective histories. With droll humor and startling imagery, Honor poses profound questions about this double-edged virtue.
Yoroboshi
Written and Directed by Satoko Ichihara
Japan Society
January 14-16
Puncture the plastic skin, shatter the glass eyes, snap them in half — they can’t feel a thing. Can they? Satoko Ichihara, one of Japan’s most uncompromising playwright-directors, makes her greatly anticipated American debut with Yoroboshi, a queer refashioning of the centuries-old Japanese moral tale of a blind boy abandoned by his father. In trash-Barbie cosplay, a lone tayu (narrator) voices every role in a household of the discarded — a sex doll, a mannequin, a traffic dummy — over the unearthly sounds of biwa lute and electronics, while puppeteers drag them through a grotesquely comic tale of love, desire, illness and violence. This is a puppet theater stripped of its innocence: Ichihara’s ruthless, intimate work will cradle you like one of her dolls — and then break you.
Angelic Architectures
Symara Sarai
Abrons Arts Center
January 13 - 23
Angelic Architectures is a powerful dance play, developed by Symara Sarai during their Abrons Performance AIRspace residency, that showcases the inner anarchy of Black queer femininity. Featuring three dancers and a musician, the show blends movement, sound, and improvisational scores to explore desire, autonomy, and one’s full range of emotion.
The Mushroom
Normandy Sherwood and Nikki Calonge
LMCC and New Georges at The Arts Center at Governors Island
January 15-31 (with UTR: January 15-24)
Created by Normandy Sherwood and Nikki Calonge, The Mushroom is a radial play with spokes pointing outward that transforms the Arts Center at Governors Island into a world of growth, decay, wonder and transformation. Blending pageantry, dance, incantation and surreal theatrical spectacle, this immersive work explores fungal movement and the porous boundaries between bodies, landscapes and forms of life. The Mushroom is an enchanted and enveloping experience made by hand to evoke a tender awe. Featuring costumes that become scenery with successions of lacy meshes, The Mushroom invites audiences into a theatrical experience that unfolds in one of New York City’s most distinctive cultural settings while asking provocative questions: How do we reenchant the world? What knows it is alive?
Le Paradoxe de John [John’s Paradox]
Concept, staging, set design by Philippe Quesne
Poems by Laura Vazquez
L’Alliance New York
January 18-22 at L’Alliance New York’s Florence Gould Theater
Obie Award-winning director and scenographer Philippe Quesne is a singular figure in French theater. With Le Paradoxe de John [John’s Paradox], Quesne's company Vivarium Studio presents a small and slightly eccentric community, lovingly rendered in his signature style of humor, care and melancholy. Paradox marks Quesne's long-awaited return to Under the Radar for the first time in over 14 years, following his triumphant 2007 play L'Effet de Serge (UTR 2009), a subtle portrait of a lonely man's unique and fragile fantasy world. In his new work, a sort of sequel to L’Effet de Serge, our focus falls on a tight collective of friends who construct an art gallery in an apartment. Using ghostly animated objects, striking effects, musical inventions, atmospheric composition and foam sculptures, a humorous world unfolds on the stage. Amidst the poetic and dreamlike texts of the writer Laura Vazquez, a theater of intimacy emerges amongst absurdity as a group of endearing characters embark together on gently surreal adventures. Le Paradoxe de John deftly explores the place of art in everyday life, highlighting the necessity of the artistic act, no matter how modest it may seem.
Fight Back
Created by David Wise
Dates TBA, at The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center (The Center) and Additional Venues TBA
Fight Back, created by David Wise, is a radical theatrical experiment with no actors. It is the Reagan Era in New York City, March 13th of 1989. You are at a meeting of the grassroots political group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), joining a passionate assembly of activists organizing to take direct humanitarian action and spur public policy to address the horror of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. What did it feel like to live through the uncertain early days of AIDS? Fight Back puts you in the shoes of the courageous LGBTQ+ and ally trailblazers who earned the world we live in today. Everyone who attends Fight Back will relive the historically accurate minutes of the March 1989 meeting, with each ticket holder assuming the specific and predetermined role of an ACT UP member who was there. Prior to the date of “performance,” you’ll receive a Fight Back dossier by email containing a biographical profile of your selected historical persona and more instructions on how to engage onsite. You can request to be assigned a specialized role, including a meeting facilitator, a civil disobedience coordinator, an expert on HIV/AIDS treatment and even Rollerena, who famously attended these meetings on roller skates. Attendees will be asked to remain in character from the moment they arrive and there’s a bit of preparation involved, but you absolutely don’t need to be an actor to join Fight Back. What you will need to do is Act Up: vocally participate, practice acts of civil disobedience, organize upcoming protests with your fellow activists and mourn those you’ve lost.
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