CHAIN WINTER ONE-ACT FESTIVAL
Chain Theatre
312 West Thirty-Sixth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
February 5 – March 1, live and virtual, $24–$35
www.chaintheatre.org
The Chain Winter One-Act Festival is back with an impressive lineup of plays through March 1, featuring twenty-eight programs consisting of between two and four works totaling sixty to eighty minutes. Soap opera fans will be especially excited, as many of the participants come from that genre (As the World Turns, All My Children, One Life to Live, Falcon Crest).
This year is highlighted by Jeryl Brunner’s Sweet Tart, directed by two-time Oscar nominee Jesse Eisenberg and starring Emmy nominee Ralph Macchio and his daughter, Julia Macchio, who played Vanessa on Cobra Kai. Sweet Tart is on a can’t-miss bill with Lyle Kessler’s Shit Kickers, starring two-time Emmy winner and Oscar nominee Carol Kane and Margaret Ladd, and John Arthur Long’s The Fusion Experiment, with David Rey and Christina Elise Perry, helmed by Chain artistic director Kirk Gostkowski. [Ed. note: It was announced on February 23 that Carol Kane will no longer be appearing in Shit Kickers; she will be replaced by Sachi Parker.]
“We don’t do safe — we do real,” Gostkowski said in a statement. “This is where audiences and artists meet on equal ground to explore the world as it is, and imagine what it could be.”
Two-time Obie-winning playwright José Rivera presents the world premiere of the fabulously titled Look What Crashed through the Portal and Ended up in Brooklyn, Emmy winner Jennifer Pepperman writes and directs Ray, David Zayas Jr. directs Diego Aguirre, Joseph Russo, and Jacob Lumet Cannavale in Aguirre’s Stalled, and three-time Emmy winner Cady McClain takes the lead in three-time Emmy-winning director Christopher Goutman’s The Oblique. Other shows to watch out for are Annabel McConnachie’s Waiting for Gadot, Sarah Swift’s True Crime, John Corins’s Brad Pitt and the Exploding Head, and Melanie Acampora’s Too Much Fondant.
General admission tickets begin at $24; if it’s too cold for you to venture outside, four of the programs will be livestreamed.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]