Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai’s FORMOSA is part of ANT Fest 2012 at Ars Nova
ANT Fest 2012, Ars Nova, 511 West 54th St., through June 28, $10
SoloNOVA Arts Festival, the New Ohio Theatre, 154 Christopher St., through June 17, $20
This month, it’s easy to get confused with a concurrent pair of theater festivals that offer fresh new work at low prices but boast similar names and unusual capitalization. At Ars Nova on West 54th St., the fifth annual ANT Fest continues through June 28, focusing on all-new talent (ANT) presenting genre-defying work, with all tickets a mere ten bucks. The festival includes such intriguing productions as Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai’s Formosa, which involves a 1960s Taiwanese Barbie doll factory; the historical musical Folk Wandering; Andrew Scoville’s Love Machine, Part 1 . . ., about a NASA-obsessed teenage girl; and the one-man show Oomphalos: Evening of Diagrams, Theories, and Preposterous Arcana from the Face Hole of Brendan Hughes. At terraNOVA, the ninth annual soloNOVA Arts Festival highlights one-person shows for twenty dollars. The series continues through June 17 with such productions as unFRAMED, in which Iyaba Ibo Mandingo combines storytelling with poetry and painting; the multimedia comedy I Light Up My Life: The Mark Sam Celebrity Autobiography; Daniel Irizarry’s UBU, about the King of the Great Expanding Universe and his love of steak; Human Fruit Bowl, in which Harmony Stempel portrays a naked model preparing for a different kind of still-life; and the dark Convergence, with Avery Pearson facing some deep-seated fears.