It’s almost that time of year when the NYC Fringe Festival dominates the theater scene with hundreds of new shows of wildly varying quality. But before the Fringe sucks the air out of the room in August, it’s worth noting that July is packed with a number of smaller, more manageable and generally more-reliable theater festivals. For starters: The Summer Play Festival: Now in its fifth season, this festival of new plays is being hosted......

ART: "Drawing Art and Politics" seems like a fitting event to have on the calendar today. "Spend an evening with New York’s renowned graphic artists Jules Feiffer, David Levine, Stan Mack, and Edward Sorel, as they examine the ways in which complex social and political issues are depicted by artists in today’s media. Jules Feiffer will moderate a discussion that explores the roots of political art and social realism in the context of John Sloan’s......

EVENT: Tonight, as part of the recurring Upstairs at the Square event, Nellie McKay plays tunes from her latest, Obligatory Villager and host Katherine Lanpher talks with author and filmmaker Antonio Monda. Monda's new book Do You Believe? Conversations on God and Religion will hit shelves soon -- and tonight he'll relay the discussions he had about religion with folks like Spike Lee and David Lynch. 7pm // Barnes & Noble [33 E 17th St]......

MOVIE: The monthly "Monday Nights with Oscar" screens teenage screamfest Carrie tonight. Was anything redacted from this Brian DePalma flick? Ask him yourself, he'll be on hand to discuss the 1976 classic he directed. 7:30pm // Academy Theater [111 E 59th St] // $5 THEATER: Theater group New Georges primarily produces new work by female playwrights; their current production is Good Heif by Maggie Smith. Set in a “hot, dry landscape”, it probes the twisted......

THEATER: The annual Soho Think Tank Ice Factory, arguably New York’s most impeccably curated theater festival, has been hosting an exhilarating array of new shows every weekend since July 4th . Starting tonight you can sink your teeth into Vampire University, in which “a struggling vampire family descends on an evangelical college in the Midwest, the dad’s mid-life crisis of immortality triggers a desire to come back to life and the gulf between first and......

MUSIC: If you haven't checked out the Summer of Love exhibit at the Whitney, head over there after work and get a double dose of rock while you're at it. Tonight Dirty Projectors and Lucky Dragons take the stage at Whitney Live. Get there early to get in. Check out this "Take Away Show" in New York featuring the Dirty Projectors. Friday // 6pm // The Whitney [945 Madison Ave at 75th St] // Free......

READINGS: Jonathan Lethem reads from his new novel You Don't Love Me Yet. In it, Lethem leaves Boerum Hill for LA "to recount the near-fame experience of a Los Angeles alternative rock band". A girl, a boy and a band - sounds like a hipster love story to us! 7pm // Barnes & Noble [33 E 17th St] // Free Saul Austerlitz talks about his book Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video.......

THEATER: The Jaded Assassin, an original “fightsical” which prompted the Times to gush, “Take that, ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’!”, was a hit at last year’s Ice Factory Festival with its daring mix of martial arts and visceral storytelling. “In a mythical world, in brutal times, a curse has plagued the land ever since the chosen ones infuriated the gods. It is up to one non-pureblood to end the curse and end the misery that has......

THEATER: Self-proclaimed “super-ultra-nerd” Brooke O’Harra has spawned Panic at P.S. 122. Written by Rafael Spregelburd, her production invokes the mood of low-budget horror movies to tell the tale of a mother and her two children as they attempt to recover the key to their safety deposit box - from the hands of the dead! Panic is part of the Buenos Aires in Translation (BAiT) festival, featuring the U.S. premieres of four playwrights from Argentina’s capital,......

READINGS: Mark Helprin, author of the whimsical and weird Freddy and Fredericka (reviewed on Gothamist) will be reading from the novel at the 7th Ave Barnes & Noble in Brooklyn. We suspect the witty parts will be even more witty when read in a British accent, so head on down. - Krissa Corbett Cavouras 7pm // Barnes & Noble [267 7th Ave. in Park Slope] // Free THEATER: As the behemoth Fringe Festival stands up,......

ART: On the Couch: Cartoons From the New Yorker is a collection of cartoons from the magazine which Bob Mankoff (the cartoon editor) says focuses on “the shrink and the shrunk, the practitioner and the practiced upon.” So we're sure you'll all be able to relate, somehow. 10am to 5pm // The Museum of New York [1220 5th Ave] // $9 YOGA: Just reading the words "sunset yoga" is relaxing. Tonight you can actually head......

THEATER: The Ohio Theater is the site of two of summer's best play festivals, and the first, Clubbed Thumb's eleventh Summerworks, started yesterday with Anne Washburn's I Have Loved Strangers, "in which true prophets, false prophets, and non-prophets battle for the salvation of ancient New York." On the company's website http://www.clubbedthumb.org/ you can do some "research" before going, via various eyebrow-raising links; or you can just rely on the winning trifecta of excellent track records:......

On Sundays Gothamist runs opinion pieces relevant to life in New York and reviews of recent books and performances. The judgments expressed below are entirely those of the author. It’s hard to imagine a quirkier, more compelling idea for a character than a half-Irish salesman, jazz aficionado, and ladies’ man who also happens to be Adolf Hitler’s nephew. It might not even be possible to dream up such a creation, and in fact Mark Kassen......

Right now we feel like the bear climbing the mountain of previews, knowing that in a couple weeks we'll reach the top and see a whole slew of shows opening (at least, that’s how we like to sing the mountain-climbing bear song). We can hardly wait for later in March when everything’s in full swing, but there’s more than enough to keep us awash in Playbills…er, hand-folded programs…for now. It feels like the fall EATFest......

The city is no longer awash in saffron, but we promise there is still a lot to do this weekend... COMEDY: The "Dark Side of the Moon" Show: Buy, Beg, Borrow or Steal starts tonight at the UCB Theater. This totally psychadelic and surreal theater experience pokes fun at the popular rumor that The Wizard of OZ syncs up perfectly with Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (it DOES. Instructions: wait for the 3rd......