screen, page, stage

Created by immersive theater veterans Ingrid Kapteyn and Tony Bordonaro, Chalk Outline Portal turns Theaterlab into a sensory-heavy dystopian game room where dance, gaming, intimacy, and audience participation blur together in chaotic and thrilling ways.

Set against the gray heaviness of Rochester winters, Lake Effect explores adultery, family fallout, and emotional stagnation with sharp observations about suburban life. Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney captures Upstate New York beautifully, even if the novel’s emotional complexity doesn’t always hit as hard as it wants to.

At a warm queer gathering in Brooklyn Heights, conversations about astrology, messy lesbians, and coming-of-age relationships revealed something deeper beneath the tarot cards and cosmic language: the difficult work of building chosen family.

Canciones is less like attending immersive theater and more like accidentally being folded into someone’s loud, loving, emotionally complicated family party. With soulful live mariachi music, fresh tamales, porch chisme, and performances so intimate they feel overheard rather than staged, it’s one of the most restorative and memorable theater experiences I’ve had in years.

Xochitl Gonzalez’s Last Night in Brooklyn captures an early-2000s Brooklyn that felt communal, ambitious, and alive. Moving between artists, finance types, parties, and Fort Greene apartments, the novel remembers a version of New York that increasingly feels difficult to hold onto.

A visually striking, tightly directed production, Beauty Freak examines the rise of a filmmaker whose success is inseparable from Nazi power. It is a smart, unsettling play about ambition, denial, and the cost of looking away.

A quiet, slow-burning novel about a woman who feels like an outsider in her own life. Nothing neatly resolves—and that’s exactly why it lingers.

Winning the Booker Prize sounds glamorous. According to David Szalay, it’s mostly unbearable. In a packed room at the 92nd Street Y, he spoke with Sam Lipsyte about Flesh, the tension between desire and disgust, and why he refuses to let his protagonist explain himself.