Zora Howard is feeling at home these days, and not only because the Pulitzer-nominated playwright is back in New York City after tour stops in Phoenix, Boston, and Chicago with her haunting three-hander Hang Time (it had its premiere at The Flea in Tribeca in spring 2023). Now onstage at Harlem’s new Victoria Theater, part of the Apollo Theater complex that’s currently under renovation, through Nov. 16, Hang Time is taking place just a stone’s throw away from the spot Howard, who grew up in the neighborhood, recalled overhearing a phrase she knew should go in a play someday.
“Brother tryna challenge my somebodiness,” is what she recalls a man saying to a friend on the street near the Apollo. The line stuck with her until she finally found a play and a character to give it to: Slim, the middle-aged Black man suspended in a kind of liminal space between life and death alongside two others of different ages, the young Blood and the older Bird. As these three generations of men bicker and banter and otherwise shoot the shit, they’re “hanging” in the sense of casual time-killing. But they also appear to physically hang in space, as if they’ve been lynched, either literally or in the virtual sense in which racialized violence disproportionally visits Black lives in the U.S.
“There is no rope, there is no tree,” Howard explained in a recent interview. But the three performers (Julian Rozzell, Kamal Bolden, and Bryce Foley) do often suggest the poses of men in their last moments at the end of a rope, with tilts of the head, occasional frantic twitching, and moments when the platform they’re standing on descends, leaving their legs dangling in mid-air (they’re actually sitting on bicycle seats and hooked invisibly to a hydraulic rig, courtesy of scenic designer Neal Wilkinson, revealed Howard, who is also the play’s directors).
That arresting image, which greets audiences as soon as they enter the theatre, came to Howard during the fraught summer of 2020, when, as she put it, “I was inside like everyone else was, kind of glued to my screen, hungry for information about what was going on in the world.” She happened to glimpse a link that led her to a brief news story about a young Black man who’d been found hanging in Victorville, California, Malcolm Harsch, and she soon learned of another similar case, of the hanging death of Robert Fuller, in Palmdale. There was little information available about either man’s death, which Howard “found very alarming for a number of reasons. One because of the violence itself and how horrific it is, and that it was happening in what felt like back-to-back instances and within such a close proximity. I couldn’t stop thinking about these men. I guess I was looking for more so that I could properly mourn them. So I began writing.”
As Bess Wohl told me about the writing of Liberation, Howard said that once she settled on the notion of memorializing these men as real people, with particular dreams and disappointments and disagreements, her characters “started coming up, and they were very strong. It’s a blessing when that happens to you as a writer; you don’t have to search and pull too hard to find them. Slim, Bird, and Blood just started talking and I just started writing.”
The result is a poetic, almost Beckettian choral piece, in which long silences—what Howard marks in the script as “pivots”—signify as much as the dialogue.
“So much of Hang Time is about its stillness and its silence, and resisting the urge to fill it, which is hard to do,” Howard said. “We want to fill it. We want to do a thing. We want to entertain. But what we’re after here is that this is the engagement, this is the task, this is the event: These men are caught in this way and they don’t have the choice to fill, and so we shouldn’t get the privilege of filling that silence either. We have to stay in it and reckon with it.”
Warming to the theme of art’s responsibility in a time of crisis, Howard added, “Maybe the arts need to do that more. Right now there are a lot of things that can distract us or give us the okay to look away or pass by. I think we need art to grab us, to shake us.”
The Twain Shall Meet
Hal Holbrook toured his Mark Twain Tonight show for six decades—indeed, the show’s origins go back to his late-1940s college days at Denison University—before his death in 2021. Richard Thomas, the seasoned actor with the eternally boyish look and warm, fuzzy voice, has only played the show for a few months on the road, since the Holbrook estate tapped him as an official successor earlier this year. But he’s got one edge on Holbrook, he told me in a recent interview: Though he hardly looks it, he’s at least closer to the age of his character.
“The only advantage I have over Hal is that I’m 74—I’m actually older than Twain was when he gave his lectures,” said Thomas, who will step out of the tour in a few months to appear in David Lindsay Abaire’s The Balusters at Manhattan Theatre Club. “Somebody asked me about the walk that I do in this part, and I said, ‘That’s just the walk I have when I get up in the middle of the night to go pee.’ I don’t have to act old. I’m right there. I’m loving that, because I’ve always been very youthful, and a lot of times I’ve played lower than my age. It’s so wonderful to actually be playing my own age and letting all those aches and pains be part of the show.”
Holbrook’s script, compiled entirely from Twain’s own words— lectures, occasional pieces, and a memorable passage from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—is not a conventional play but, as its title advertises, a kind of reconstituted visit, a stage incarnation of what it would be like to see the 19th-century humorist in the flesh. Holbrook tinkered with it over the years, and Thomas said he’s been afforded a similar opportunity.
“What you inherit is really like a deck of cards, and you sort of shuffle them the way you see fit,” he said. “It’s a very open form. I’ve already done a lot of my own work on it, using Hal’s material that was sent to me, of course, and occasionally adding something that I feel is germane to right now, something salient in our lives at the moment. It’s very exciting; you really do feel like a co-creator in the process.”
He’s hardly had to add much to make the material speak to our current moment. Consider this passage from Twain’s autobiography:
Vast power and wealth corrupt a nation. They incite dangerous ambitions and will bring the Republic down. They can pack the Supreme Court friendly to their ambitions, ride down the Congress, and crush the People’s voice. A Blight has fallen upon us and the Monarchy of the Rich and Powerful is the author of it. I had not expected the Monarchy to come so soon, but it is here, and it is sitting on the throne.
“You can hear a pin drop, and every now and then it erupts into applause,” Thomas said of that moment. “It depends on where you’re playing, of course.”
I counted 48 dates in 28 states, plus Washington, D.C., on Thomas’s itinerary, from Aug. 12 to next Feb. 22, 2026. As he put it, “Touring is intense, period, but this is a whole different animal for me. There are no sitdowns. There aren’t any sitdowns here at all. This is like touring as a musician or maybe a comedian or a concert act.” Though he’s “well seasoned” after completing three Broadway tours (Twelve Angry Men, The Humans, and To Kill a Mockingbird), “This just kicks the difficulty factor up just a little bit. But I’m enjoying it.”
He’s also not trying to recreate Holbrook’s iconic performance as Twain.
“I didn’t want to be Twain and Hal—that’s double duty, right?” he quipped. “It’s enough that every night when I go onstage, I’ve got Twain on one shoulder and Hal Holbrook on the other. No pressure!
“I’m really able to just be in the moment with these extraordinary people, Hal and Twain, and with the way Twain mirrors us as a nation, with all the contradictions, the sort of maximalist qualities we have as Americans, the light and the shadow. I mean, don’t you wish he was still alive, along with George Carlin? I would love to hear what they’d say now.”
Around Town
Like many, I suspect, I was eager to see Ariana DeBose return to the stage, but I didn’t know much about the Stephen Schwartz/Joseph Stein musical The Baker’s Wife. I was utterly charmed by Gordon Greenberg’s new revival at Classic Stage Company, with a cast so full of Broadway powerhouses I don’t see how it could afford to actually transfer to Broadway (but here’s hoping!)…I had a few quibbles and questions but by and large I found Robert Icke’s new National Theatre staging of Oedipus at the Roundabout’s Studio 54 to be a stunner, especially for the long monologue Lesley Manville masterfully delivers as Jocasta. Was also happy to see journeyman actor John Carroll Lynch make his Broadway debut—one of the few Americans in a largely British cast, though my companion didn’t clock it, so good was Carroll Lynch’s accent…I had something of an L.A. reunion when I saw Bat Boy at City Center. I’d seen the original staging at Actors’ Gang back in 1997, and was friendly with composer Laurence O’Keefe, co-book writer Keythe Farley, and original Shelley, costume designer Ann Closs-Farley, all of whom were there on the night I went. Chatting with director Alex Timbers after the show, it became clear not only that Bat Boy was a perfect fit for his tastes and talents, but also that it was a long-held dream of his to direct it professionally (he’d staged it previously at Yale)…Also at City Center, I savored Martyna Majok’s heart-wrenching Queens, about immigrant women struggling against punishing odds for dignity and belonging in the borough I call home. The Manhattan Theatre Club production has an ensemble cast to die for, led by frequent Majok interpreter Marin Ireland…I’d say much the same about the cast of Sam Hunter’s Little Bear Ridge Road, which I saw at Steppenwolf last year but which is even better on Broadway. I don’t know how she does it, but there’s a way in which the great Laurie Metcalf is able to play to a large house without sacrificing a whit of her innate subtlety and economy. It is so satisfying to witness…I trucked to the Metropolitan Opera earlier this week to see Sting do some songs from his underrated musical The Last Ship, considered a flop on Broadway in 2014 but headed for a tour next spring that will land the show on the Met stage June 9-14, 2026…If I didn’t have a prior commitment I would definitely be trying to attend a Nov. 21 concert performance of Fats Waller’s “lost” musical from 1943, Early to Bed, emceed by linguist (and sometime American Theatre contributor) John McWhorter at the Triad Theatre on the Upper West Side.
What Else Is New
And now, a list of all the world premieres in the U.S. this month. (I’m breaking them into regions using the Census Bureau’s delineations):
West
Perfect World, which ran at North Hollywood’s El Portal Theatre Nov. 1-9, is a musical about the real-life child prodigy author Barbara Follett, whose 1920s-era books were set in a fictional utopia, and who disappeared in her 20s. The book is by Alan Edmunds and music by Richard Winzeler, with lyrics by both.
Broad Theatre in Austin is home to the premiere of Anikka Lekven’s A Doctor’s Visit, a multi-part parable about women’s bodily autonomy. It runs Nov. 6-22 and is directed by Molly Fonseca.
Eric Anderson’s Outlandish, about the intersection in Hilo, Hawaiʻi, of two real-life figures—Victorian travel writer Isabella Bird and Lunalilo, the King of Hawaiʻi—plays at Honolulu’s Kumu Kahua Theatre Nov. 6-Dec. 7.
Dog Mom is a new comedy by Tate Hanyok about a reluctant human and a determined animal. It runs at B Street Theatre in Sacramento, California, Nov. 9-29. John Lamb is the director.
Jessica Huang’s Mother of Exiles, at Berkeley Repertory Theatre Nov. 14-Dec. 21, follows a mixed-race American immigrant family from Angel Island in 1898 to a climate-catastrophic future. Jaki Bradley directs.
Mo Willems’s popular TYA series gets a new addition with The Pigeon Gets a Big Time Holiday Extravaganza!, in a rolling world premiere that kicks off at Houston’s Main Street Theatre, Nov. 16-Dec. 20 (see Midwest listings below for next production). Script and lyrics are by Willems and Adam Tobin, the music by frequent collaborator Deborah Wicks La Puma.
Beautiful Princess Disorder is a new play by Kathy Ng, with such characters as Triangle Person, Mother Theresa, Killer Whale Tilikum, and God in what’s billed as “a fuzzy-edged sibling drama for the only child.” Directed by Jason Nodler, it runs at Houston’s Catastrophic Theatre, Nov. 21-Dec. 13.
Midwest
Spookley and the Christmas Kittens, a new holiday play adapted from a popular Netflix special by Joe Troiano and Jeffrey Zahn, plays at Stages Theatre Company in Hopkins, Minnesota, Nov. 1-30. The director is Cody R. Braudt.
Liza Birkenmeier and Trish Harnetiaux’s Magic Valley Community Theatre’s Little Women, about a small-town production of a stage version of Louisa May Alcott’s classic, plays at Kansas City, Missouri’s Unicorn Theatre, Nov. 12-Dec. 7. Ernie Nolan is the director.
St. Paul, Minnesota’s History Theatre will debut a new holiday offering, Rollicking! A Winter Carnival Musical, Nov. 20-Dec. 21. With book by Rachel Teagle and music by Keith Hovis (and lyrics by both of them), it follows a couple whose ice palace design plunges them into a magical realm. It’s directed by Laura Leffler.
The rolling world premiere of the latest Mo Willems adaptation, The Pigeon Gets a Big Time Holiday Extravaganza!, continues at Milwaukee’s First Stage, Nov. 21-Dec. 28. (See West listings above for more details.)
Northeast
Sonja Devi’s self-penned solo show Today Is a Good Day, New York New York, about a young woman who wakes up in a stranger’s apartment without a memory of the previous night, is at NYC’s Gene Frankel Theatre through Nov. 22.
Ben Gassm
an’s dark comedy Adult Relationships, about inter-faith ex-lovers at a troubled friend’s wake, runs Nov. 1-21 at the Collapsable Hole, in a production by The Tank. Tara Elliott directs.
Drew Droege’s Messy White Gays, a murderous comedy set in Hell’s Kitchen, opened on Nov. 2 at a theatre not far from its NYC setting, the Duke on 42nd, and runs through Jan. 11, 2026. It’s directed by Mike Donahue.
Emma Rosa Went directs Else Went’s Initiative, a new five-hour, two-part epic about a group of Dungeons-and-Dragons-playing millennials, running Nov. 4-30 at NYC’s Public Theater.
The Passion According to Janair, a solo play inspired by Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, follows a Black domestic worker in Rio de Janeiro as she confronts racial, gender, and class-based oppression. Written by Ana Carbatti, who also stars, and Andressa Furlett, who also directs, it’s at NYC’s HERE Arts Center Nov. 5-23.
Eli Bauman’s new musical about the presidency of Barack Obama, 44, opened at NYC’s Daryl Roth Theatre on Nov. 6 and is slated to run through Jan. 4, 2026. The director is
Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater will offer its first family offering (“For ages 7 to 107”): a new adaptation of the popular fairy tale The Snow Queen, adapted by Evgeny Schwartz and directed by Yury Urnov. It runs Nov. 11-23.
Ngozi Anwanyu’s The Monsters: A Sibling Love Story, set in the world of Mixed Martial Arts, plays at Red Bank, New Jersey’s Two River Theater, Nov 13-23. Anwanyu also directs the play, a co-production with Manhattan Theatre Club.
Ethan Lipton’s musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, The Seat of Our Pants, opened last night (Nov. 13) at NYC’s Public Theater, with direction by Leigh Silverman. It runs through Nov. 30.
Already in previews, Talene Monahon’s Meet the Cartozians opens Nov. 17 at Off-Broadway’s Second Stage and runs through Dec. 7. Directed by David Cromer, it’s an intergenerational study of Armenians in America (and it stars Andrea Martin).
Iraisa Ann Reilly’s A Bodega Princess Remembers La Fiesta de los Reyes Magos, 1998, a solo show about Reilly’s family and hometown in Egg Harbor City, New Jersey, runs at NYC’s Ensemble Studio Theatre, Nov. 17-Dec. 14. The director is Estefanía Fadul.
Nazareth Hassan’s Practice, now in previews, opens Nov. 18 and runs through Dec. 7 at Playwrights Horizons. Directed by Keenan Tyler Oliphant, the play follows a company of arts workers in thrall to a cult-like leader.
Now in previews, Tom Hanks and James Glossman’s time-traveling romance This World of Tomorrow, which stars Hanks and Kelli O’Hara, opens Nov. 18 and runs through Dec. 21 at The Shed in NYC. The director is Kenny Leon.
With Deepest Regrets, Lupe Vélez is the title of Intar’s annual Unit 52 public workshop presentation, created by commissioning 10 writers—Luis Alfaro, Julissa Contreras, Migdalia Curz, Antonia Cruz-Kent, Guadalís Del Carmen, Georgine Escobar, C. Julian Jiménez, Octavio Solis, Jesús I. Valles, and CQ Quintana—to contribute 5 minutes of material, one after another, exquisite corpse style. It plays at the NYC theatre Nov. 21-22.
Nicole Catania’s & all our yesterdays, about old friends who reunite in the hospice room of a friend, runs at NYC’s The Flea Theatre, Nov. 21-Dec. 6. A presentation of Superposition House, it’s directed by Micah Hauptman.
Colombian American playwright Chris Gabo premieres The Surgeon and Her Daughters, in a Colt Coeur production at Theater 154 in New York City, Nov. 23-Dec. 20. It’s about a Marine sergeant major whose daughters investigate her sudden disappearance. Adrienne Campbell-Holt directs.
South
Wishing to Grow Up Brightly is a new musical based on the real-life story of Amanda Morton, who wrote the book with Matthew Decker and Brenson Thomas. Playing at Washington, D.C.’s Theatre Horizon Nov. 5-23, the show follows a Korean American adoptee as she sorts through the surprising mementoes left behind by her late father. Music is by Josh Totora, who also wrote the lyrics with Morton; Matthew Decker is the director.
Based on the animated film of the same name, The Snowman and the Snowdog is a new TYA holiday show from former Imagination Stage artistic director Janet Stanford, which will play at the theatre in Bethesda, Maryland, Nov. 11-Jan. 4, 2026.
Three Pianos (not to be confused with the Dave Malloy show) is running at Sarasota’s Florida Studio Theatre Nov. 19-March 29, 2026. Created by Rebecca Hopkins, Richard Hopkins, and Sarah Durham, it’s a revue paying tribute to keyboard giants like Billy Joel, Alicia Keys, Ray Charles, Freddie Mercury, and more.
