Rogue Theater Festival is back and bigger than ever! We are so excited to be moving uptown and presenting our festival live and in person at Theatre Row for TWO WHOLE WEEKS. We are presenting plays, musicals, staged readings, and ending the week with multiple performances of a show developed through Rogue over the years. We have to admit, they're all so unique and entertaining there's really something for everyone.
DOWNTOWN: A NEW MUSICAL IN CONCERT
By: Gavin Matthias
Tuesday, June 6th
7:00pm
Featuring composer/lyricist Gavin Matthias on piano, join us for an evening of excerpts from the upcoming production of DOWNTOWN, as well as anecdotes and additional songs. This new musical comedy and political satire will be playing in two boroughs: July 7-9 at Empire Outlets on Staten Island and July 12-13 at TheTankNYC.
HEARTBREAK IN TOMPKINS SQUARE PARK
By: Christine Stoddard
Wednesday, June 7th
7:00pm
Aiden, a gay white man in 1950s upper-class New York, enters a loveless marriage with Querida, a former stage actress with a shady family history, and has a son. His life changes when his secretary, Credenza, a lesbian who escaped the Jewish orthodoxy, hatches a plan that will allow him to be with his lover Bentley, a Black painter and gallery owner.
EVERY 7ISH MINUTES
By: Rebecca Kane
Thursday, June 8th
7:00pm
It's a solo show! It's a naloxone training! It's a solo show about naloxone training -- and there's confetti! In 2020, I got training not just to dispense naloxone (a drug that can reverse an opioid overdose in a matter of minutes) but to safely teach others to do so. After still failing to get proper attention to the issue, I wrote a script that successfully gets all the information across needed to complete a naloxone training while something new and entertaining happening at least every seven minutes (which just so happens to be how often someone in the United States in 2021 died of an opioid-related overdose).
CONTENT WARNING: Discussion of drug use, overdose, and death; stage blood; loud noises
SURVIVING THE ROSENTHALS
By: Arnie Roman
Friday, June 9th
7:00pm
Twenty-eight-year old Sammy Rosenthal is living in New York and lost in his life. Until he meets the one person who could change everything. Himself.
ABANDON ALL HOPE
By: Peter Fenton
Saturday, June 10th
7:00pm
When three college freshmen (a scrappy activist, a naïve evangelical and a cocky analyst) meet
in Hell, which appears as a dorm room, a fun-loving demon challenges them to a game with
astronomical stakes, which draws out each one's fatal flaws in their confrontations with each
other and themselves. The winner will go to Heaven at the cost of the others' eternal torture.
Inspired by THE GOOD PLACE, KNIVES OUT, and NO EXIT, playwright Peter Fenton's
Off-Broadway debut explores ethics, organized religion, identity, and redemption.
FEEDBACK
By: Katherine Boorstein
Sunday, June 11th
3:00pm
A modest college freshman and a reclusive upperclassman form an unlikely creative partnership. When their relationship begins to step over the line between literary and physical intimacy, they must cope with the fallout of their shared ignorance about consent. 'Feedback' reckons with coming-of-age, creativity, and what we learn (and don’t learn) about sex as we grow up.
THIS HOUSE IS NOT A HOME
By: Kyle Thomas
Tuesday, June 13th
7:00pm
A shoe repair shop. One of the last of its kind. A place where craft matters. The owner leads a quiet existence until it is upended by the return of the son of his late business partner. The son returns and is looking for work... and answers. These two men know so much and yet so little about one another. The son wants to know more about his father, and the nature of his exit from the business. The owner is reluctant to share, for reasons that become painfully clear. Not all seams can be stitched back together.
HOYT ST.
By: Francesca Bolam
Wednesday, June 14th
2:00pm
When writer Melissa is given an opportunity by an old producer friend, she realizes that the unraveling of her romantic relationship with Jay is the catalyst for discovering her voice through her own story.
NOSEBLEED: A "COMEDY" ABOUT MAIL, HYPOTHETICALS, AND CRAZY LOUD SEX
By: Carly Polistina
Wednesday, June 14th
7:00pm
When two strangers run into each other (and can’t stop running into each other) they get locked in a disaster-prone back-and-forth fraught with injury, mail related felonies, and hypothetical questions. Through this “comedy” they grapple with the most devastating mire of the human condition: getting to know someone.
SENSELESS
By: Wayne L. Firestone
Friday, June 16th
7:00pm
Saturday, June 17th
7:00pm
Sunday, June 18th
3:00pm
Senseless is a present day rhapsody of five senses as experienced by a range of historical and fantastical characters and critters— from Middle Age plagues to an afterlife RBG courtroom to a revived Cold War space race. Guided by a Blind “Girl” of Justice statue, these intermingled characters navigate both threats and farces to make sense of present day plagues and blaze paths to collective healing.
SNOWBALL
By: Maeve Kelley Baker
Saturday, June 17th
2:00pm
A customer walks into a corner store asking for a product that’s not being sold there. As the customer keeps returning to the store for the item, tensions rise and patience dwindles. And everything snowballs from there.