Artistic Director Robert Lyons founded the Soho Think Tank in 1994 to produce, present, and program vibrant, envelope-pushing work at the Ohio Theatre in Soho. And for over 15 years the guy has done just what he set out to do, programming a consistently impressive roster of shows by some of the most innovative, independent theater-makers in town. As his reward, the Ohio Theatre is being evicted by its new money-grubbing tool of a landlord at the end of August. Saturday night will mark the final performance at the Ohio, when Lyons's own play, Nostradamus Predicts The Death Of Soho, will be followed by a late-night celebration and farewell to the Ohio's illustrious run. Last week we caught up with Lyons during rehearsals for a conversation about what the Ohio's closure means for Soho, and where his "Think Tank" is headed next. (Click through on the photos for some of the Ohio's best shows in recent years.) more ›

After a brush with death in 2008, The Ohio Theatre, an indispensable nerve center of NYC's theater scene for 29 years, will be dispensed with on August 31st. The new landlord has issued an official notice and no further negotiations are scheduled. If you're one of those people who cares about theater as art, you know what a loss this is. As artistic Director Robert Lyons puts it, the Ohio "is where Tony Kushner produced his first play out of college, where Philip Seymour Hoffman made his professional acting debut, where Eve Ensler performed Dicks in the Desert, a decade before writing The Vagina Monologues. The Ohio Theatre has been an incubator and platform for New York’s most exciting and innovative theatre artists for almost 30 years. Its closing emphatically punctuates the end of an era in Soho." more ›

Director, playwright, actor and outcast surrealist Antonin Artaud is perhaps best known for the manifestos set forth in his book Theater and Its Double, which envisioned a new form of radical performance he dubbed “The Theater of Cruelty.” Artaud intended to shock audiences out of complacency by replacing the familiar comforts of naturalistic psycho-drama with a surreal, sensually graphic theatricality, one that traded escapism for confrontation and – Artaud theorized – would rock the bourgeois establishment with “humor as destruction.” more ›

READING: Olympia Dukakis, who you know from such films as Moonstruck and Steel Magnolias, will be at Barnes & Noble tonight. She'll be reading from a brand spakin' new edition of Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children. She recently put down the Oscar and picked up a pen to write the forward to the antiwar classic. more ›

READING: The New School's wonderful public lectures and reading series are back in swing as the school year revs up, and tonight, the ethereal Mary Gaitskill will discuss her book (a National Book Award finalist) with moderator Jeffrey Renard Allen. - Krissa Corbett Cavouras more ›

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. more ›

The Phantom of the Opera may be nearing the ripe old age of 18, but most shows in this city don’t even play 18 shows. That doesn’t mean that they’re unworthy, of course – far from it, at least in our book. For instance, there’s Clubbed Thumb’s new production What Then, which (including previews last weekend) has 16 showings at the Ohio Theatre. Written by Rinne Groff and directed by Hal Brooks, who recently got accolades for his work on Thom Paine, this is the story of a dysfunctional family and their attempts to stitch their relationships and psyches back not through therapy but rather through creating and exploring new realities through dreams and drugs. It’s a powerful vision that will leave you questioning your own perception of existence. more ›

It might be hard to get to a theatre in time to see any of these picks, but here goes. Even with our fairly averse attitude toward holiday-specific performances, it’s hard not to notice that the current crop of shows is pretty heavy on the fractured fairytale side of things. Except for kids, there’s almost no straightforward telling of a Christmas- (or other holiday) related story. We’re not complaining, but it does make it harder to pick out something as the zaniest take on the genre. Broken Watch Theatre Company’s A Broken Christmas Carol (a 21st century, NC-17 version) and the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre Company’s Christmas Carol, Oy Hanukkah, Merry Kwanzaa, Happy Ramadan (a version “with Old World accents and New World inclusiveness” – Scrooge would not approve) show that Dickens’s story is still the go-to touchstone for holiday theatre. Maybe because it’s so omnipresent, we can’t help but be a bit more drawn to Jeffrey Solomon’s one-man Santa Claus is Coming Out (or, How the Gay Agenda Came Down My Chimney) which is playing three nights at Queens Theatre in the Park. Solomon takes on a dozen plus characters in this reprisal of mockumentary about the jolly red guy with the giant belly. Oh, if the people howling about a “war on Christmas” could see all this now…not that they’d expect much more from us NYC heathens, of course. more ›

Sometimes it’s hard not to think that really, it’s Barbie’s world, we just live in it. For the next two weekends, we can at least amp up the experience: starting today at the always-awesome Ohio Theatre is the Barbie Project, a multimedia, multigenre workshop by White Bird Productions that takes a good long look at the fantastic plastic doll’s role in shaping our world. Funnyman Paul Boocock (a Gothamist interviewee fresh off his one-man show Boocock’s House of Baseball), actress/singer Lorrie Harrison, and RedWall Dance Theatre, among others, are collaborating on this “adult look at growing up with Barbie.” We expect there will be plenty of commentary in a vein that Mattel probably wouldn’t be too thrilled about; various “mystery guests” are promised, including one who is to relate the story of Ken and Barbie teaching her about sex in her station wagon. Gothamist’s most vivid Barbie memory is of the Christmas when the Santa story started to unravel because our parents couldn’t satisfactorily explain how the Barbie mansion came down the chimney, but we’re still looking forward to White Bird artistic director Kathryn Dickinson’s segment on how to accessorize your own Barbie home. Of course, it could be that we’re just desperate for new ideas on decorating our doll-sized apartment, but that’s another story. more ›