Short King

Written by Larry Phillips

Directed by Nathan Hoffmann

Alex is smart; Alex is charismatic; Alex is short…and he’d like you’d to stop pointing that last one out. The only thing Alex would change about his life is his height, even if it means going down some unconventional routes to make it happen. Short King is a comedy about a man willing to go to any length to reach his goal.

Featuring: Anthony C. Jackson, Phoebe Leonard Dettmann, Andrew Boszhardt, Robby Alston, Michael Ernesto Navarro, Marisa Gonzales, Maile Binion & Larry Phillips
Lighting Designer: Hayley Garcia Parnell
Stage Manager: Emily Prior

Short King

Written by Larry Phillips

Directed by Nathan Hoffmann

Alex is smart; Alex is charismatic; Alex is short…and he’d like you’d to stop pointing that last one out. The only thing Alex would change about his life is his height, even if it means going down some unconventional routes to make it happen. Short King is a comedy about a man willing to go to any length to reach his goal.

Featuring: Anthony C. Jackson, Phoebe Leonard Dettmann, Andrew Boszhardt, Robby Alston, Michael Ernesto Navarro, Marisa Gonzales, Maile Binion & Larry Phillips
Lighting Designer: Hayley Garcia Parnell
Stage Manager: Emily Prior

Five Sessions (A War in Therapy) by Jaime Estades

By Barrio Independent Productions

An explosive and deeply human drama!

Raw, confrontational, and theatrical to its core, Five Sessions turns the stage into a site of resistance and demands the audience stay present.

The playwright, Jaime Estades is a Puerto Rican writer, labor and community activist who has devoted his life to advocacy, education, health, and leadership training. He currently teaches master’s-level clinical and advocacy students at Columbia University (CSSW), Law and Social Work Advocacy, and is a former PhD professor of Social Policy and Research at NYU. Mr. Eddie Torres will direct the play.

"Five Sessions" is not a polite play—it is a confrontation staged in real time. Estades’ provocation lands with surgical force: “Would slaves in the South have felt better about slavery if they had therapy three times a week?” The line functions as a dramatic rupture—there is no answer, only reckoning.

"Five Sessions" cuts straight into the contradictions of the mental-health system and the society that frames it. As a theatrical work, it exposes the limits of therapy when structural injustice remains untreated and state responsibility is deflected onto the individual.

Set in present-day New York City, it traps two persons in a confined theatrical space and dares the audience to witness the collision. Across five charged therapy sessions, Christine Kennedy—a young, white, Ivy-League–trained therapist armed with theory, credentials, and good intentions—faces Vidal “Super” Estrella, a Latino building superintendent, labor organizer, and suicidal man shaped by exploitation, grief, and systemic abandonment. It forces audiences, clinicians, and policymakers alike to confront the inadequacy of care without justice, treatment without rights.

Director: Eddie Torres.

Mr. Torres’s recent theater credits include the California premiere of Water by the Spoonful and the World Premiere of The Happiest Song Plays Last, both by Pulitzer Prize Winner Quiara Alegría Hudes, as well as MacBeth for The Public Theater’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit, and a workshop of Like They Magical for Playwrights Realm in New York City, in addition to an extensive career.

Cast: Belange Rodriguez, Ivan Goris, Bill Blechingberg and Kyle Glenn

Five Sessions (A War in Therapy) by Jaime Estades

By Barrio Independent Productions

An explosive and deeply human drama!

Raw, confrontational, and theatrical to its core, Five Sessions turns the stage into a site of resistance and demands the audience stay present.

The playwright, Jaime Estades is a Puerto Rican writer, labor and community activist who has devoted his life to advocacy, education, health, and leadership training. He currently teaches master’s-level clinical and advocacy students at Columbia University (CSSW), Law and Social Work Advocacy, and is a former PhD professor of Social Policy and Research at NYU. Mr. Eddie Torres will direct the play.

"Five Sessions" is not a polite play—it is a confrontation staged in real time. Estades’ provocation lands with surgical force: “Would slaves in the South have felt better about slavery if they had therapy three times a week?” The line functions as a dramatic rupture—there is no answer, only reckoning.

"Five Sessions" cuts straight into the contradictions of the mental-health system and the society that frames it. As a theatrical work, it exposes the limits of therapy when structural injustice remains untreated and state responsibility is deflected onto the individual.

Set in present-day New York City, it traps two persons in a confined theatrical space and dares the audience to witness the collision. Across five charged therapy sessions, Christine Kennedy—a young, white, Ivy-League–trained therapist armed with theory, credentials, and good intentions—faces Vidal “Super” Estrella, a Latino building superintendent, labor organizer, and suicidal man shaped by exploitation, grief, and systemic abandonment. It forces audiences, clinicians, and policymakers alike to confront the inadequacy of care without justice, treatment without rights.

Director: Eddie Torres.

Mr. Torres’s recent theater credits include the California premiere of Water by the Spoonful and the World Premiere of The Happiest Song Plays Last, both by Pulitzer Prize Winner Quiara Alegría Hudes, as well as MacBeth for The Public Theater’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit, and a workshop of Like They Magical for Playwrights Realm in New York City, in addition to an extensive career.

Cast: Belange Rodriguez, Ivan Goris, Bill Blechingberg and Kyle Glenn

Five Sessions (A War in Therapy) by Jaime Estades

By Barrio Independent Productions

An explosive and deeply human drama!

Raw, confrontational, and theatrical to its core, Five Sessions turns the stage into a site of resistance and demands the audience stay present.

The playwright, Jaime Estades is a Puerto Rican writer, labor and community activist who has devoted his life to advocacy, education, health, and leadership training. He currently teaches master’s-level clinical and advocacy students at Columbia University (CSSW), Law and Social Work Advocacy, and is a former PhD professor of Social Policy and Research at NYU. Mr. Eddie Torres will direct the play.

"Five Sessions" is not a polite play—it is a confrontation staged in real time. Estades’ provocation lands with surgical force: “Would slaves in the South have felt better about slavery if they had therapy three times a week?” The line functions as a dramatic rupture—there is no answer, only reckoning.

"Five Sessions" cuts straight into the contradictions of the mental-health system and the society that frames it. As a theatrical work, it exposes the limits of therapy when structural injustice remains untreated and state responsibility is deflected onto the individual.

Set in present-day New York City, it traps two persons in a confined theatrical space and dares the audience to witness the collision. Across five charged therapy sessions, Christine Kennedy—a young, white, Ivy-League–trained therapist armed with theory, credentials, and good intentions—faces Vidal “Super” Estrella, a Latino building superintendent, labor organizer, and suicidal man shaped by exploitation, grief, and systemic abandonment. It forces audiences, clinicians, and policymakers alike to confront the inadequacy of care without justice, treatment without rights.

Director: Eddie Torres.

Mr. Torres’s recent theater credits include the California premiere of Water by the Spoonful and the World Premiere of The Happiest Song Plays Last, both by Pulitzer Prize Winner Quiara Alegría Hudes, as well as MacBeth for The Public Theater’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit, and a workshop of Like They Magical for Playwrights Realm in New York City, in addition to an extensive career.

Cast: Belange Rodriguez, Ivan Goris, Bill Blechingberg and Kyle Glenn

Five Sessions (A War in Therapy) by Jaime Estades

By Barrio Independent Productions

An explosive and deeply human drama!

Raw, confrontational, and theatrical to its core, Five Sessions turns the stage into a site of resistance and demands the audience stay present.

The playwright, Jaime Estades is a Puerto Rican writer, labor and community activist who has devoted his life to advocacy, education, health, and leadership training. He currently teaches master’s-level clinical and advocacy students at Columbia University (CSSW), Law and Social Work Advocacy, and is a former PhD professor of Social Policy and Research at NYU. Mr. Eddie Torres will direct the play.

"Five Sessions" is not a polite play—it is a confrontation staged in real time. Estades’ provocation lands with surgical force: “Would slaves in the South have felt better about slavery if they had therapy three times a week?” The line functions as a dramatic rupture—there is no answer, only reckoning.

"Five Sessions" cuts straight into the contradictions of the mental-health system and the society that frames it. As a theatrical work, it exposes the limits of therapy when structural injustice remains untreated and state responsibility is deflected onto the individual.

Set in present-day New York City, it traps two persons in a confined theatrical space and dares the audience to witness the collision. Across five charged therapy sessions, Christine Kennedy—a young, white, Ivy-League–trained therapist armed with theory, credentials, and good intentions—faces Vidal “Super” Estrella, a Latino building superintendent, labor organizer, and suicidal man shaped by exploitation, grief, and systemic abandonment. It forces audiences, clinicians, and policymakers alike to confront the inadequacy of care without justice, treatment without rights.

Director: Eddie Torres.

Mr. Torres’s recent theater credits include the California premiere of Water by the Spoonful and the World Premiere of The Happiest Song Plays Last, both by Pulitzer Prize Winner Quiara Alegría Hudes, as well as MacBeth for The Public Theater’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit, and a workshop of Like They Magical for Playwrights Realm in New York City, in addition to an extensive career.

Cast: Belange Rodriguez, Ivan Goris, Bill Blechingberg and Kyle Glenn

Back by popular demand, The Sidekick Troupe is restaging two of our award winning parody musicals in conjunction with each other - The unofficial unauthorized film-to-stage adaptation of Barbie’s Princess & The Pauper and Les Femmes Mousquetaires: A parody adaptation of Barbie and the Three Musketeers. Both shows follow female heroines in their journeys of discovering who they are and who they want to be. In Princess & The Pauper our heroines, Erika and Anneliese, work in tandem to try to save the kingdom from the evil Royal Advisor, Preminger. In Les Femmes Mousquetaires, our heroine Corinne, bands together with three other women who share her dream of being the first women musketeers in France, secretly training and uncovering a plot against the prince. These musical parodies are commemorative jukeboxes of classic Barbie music from our childhood celebrating all the silly and heartfelt things we love about Barbie.

All for one - and one for all!

Back by popular demand, The Sidekick Troupe is restaging two of our award winning parody musicals in conjunction with each other - The unofficial unauthorized film-to-stage adaptation of Barbie’s Princess & The Pauper and Les Femmes Mousquetaires: A parody adaptation of Barbie and the Three Musketeers. Both shows follow female heroines in their journeys of discovering who they are and who they want to be. In Princess & The Pauper our heroines, Erika and Anneliese, work in tandem to try to save the kingdom from the evil Royal Advisor, Preminger. In Les Femmes Mousquetaires, our heroine Corinne, bands together with three other women who share her dream of being the first women musketeers in France, secretly training and uncovering a plot against the prince. These musical parodies are commemorative jukeboxes of classic Barbie music from our childhood celebrating all the silly and heartfelt things we love about Barbie.

All for one - and one for all!

Five Sessions (A War in Therapy) by Jaime Estades

By Barrio Independent Productions

An explosive and deeply human drama!

Raw, confrontational, and theatrical to its core, Five Sessions turns the stage into a site of resistance and demands the audience stay present.

The playwright, Jaime Estades is a Puerto Rican writer, labor and community activist who has devoted his life to advocacy, education, health, and leadership training. He currently teaches master’s-level clinical and advocacy students at Columbia University (CSSW), Law and Social Work Advocacy, and is a former PhD professor of Social Policy and Research at NYU. Mr. Eddie Torres will direct the play.

"Five Sessions" is not a polite play—it is a confrontation staged in real time. Estades’ provocation lands with surgical force: “Would slaves in the South have felt better about slavery if they had therapy three times a week?” The line functions as a dramatic rupture—there is no answer, only reckoning.

"Five Sessions" cuts straight into the contradictions of the mental-health system and the society that frames it. As a theatrical work, it exposes the limits of therapy when structural injustice remains untreated and state responsibility is deflected onto the individual.

Set in present-day New York City, it traps two persons in a confined theatrical space and dares the audience to witness the collision. Across five charged therapy sessions, Christine Kennedy—a young, white, Ivy-League–trained therapist armed with theory, credentials, and good intentions—faces Vidal “Super” Estrella, a Latino building superintendent, labor organizer, and suicidal man shaped by exploitation, grief, and systemic abandonment. It forces audiences, clinicians, and policymakers alike to confront the inadequacy of care without justice, treatment without rights.

Director: Eddie Torres.

Mr. Torres’s recent theater credits include the California premiere of Water by the Spoonful and the World Premiere of The Happiest Song Plays Last, both by Pulitzer Prize Winner Quiara Alegría Hudes, as well as MacBeth for The Public Theater’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit, and a workshop of Like They Magical for Playwrights Realm in New York City, in addition to an extensive career.

Cast: Belange Rodriguez, Ivan Goris, Bill Blechingberg and Kyle Glenn

Five Sessions (A War in Therapy) by Jaime Estades

By Barrio Independent Productions

An explosive and deeply human drama!

Raw, confrontational, and theatrical to its core, Five Sessions turns the stage into a site of resistance and demands the audience stay present.

The playwright, Jaime Estades is a Puerto Rican writer, labor and community activist who has devoted his life to advocacy, education, health, and leadership training. He currently teaches master’s-level clinical and advocacy students at Columbia University (CSSW), Law and Social Work Advocacy, and is a former PhD professor of Social Policy and Research at NYU. Mr. Eddie Torres will direct the play.

"Five Sessions" is not a polite play—it is a confrontation staged in real time. Estades’ provocation lands with surgical force: “Would slaves in the South have felt better about slavery if they had therapy three times a week?” The line functions as a dramatic rupture—there is no answer, only reckoning.

"Five Sessions" cuts straight into the contradictions of the mental-health system and the society that frames it. As a theatrical work, it exposes the limits of therapy when structural injustice remains untreated and state responsibility is deflected onto the individual.

Set in present-day New York City, it traps two persons in a confined theatrical space and dares the audience to witness the collision. Across five charged therapy sessions, Christine Kennedy—a young, white, Ivy-League–trained therapist armed with theory, credentials, and good intentions—faces Vidal “Super” Estrella, a Latino building superintendent, labor organizer, and suicidal man shaped by exploitation, grief, and systemic abandonment. It forces audiences, clinicians, and policymakers alike to confront the inadequacy of care without justice, treatment without rights.

Director: Eddie Torres.

Mr. Torres’s recent theater credits include the California premiere of Water by the Spoonful and the World Premiere of The Happiest Song Plays Last, both by Pulitzer Prize Winner Quiara Alegría Hudes, as well as MacBeth for The Public Theater’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit, and a workshop of Like They Magical for Playwrights Realm in New York City, in addition to an extensive career.

Cast: Belange Rodriguez, Ivan Goris, Bill Blechingberg and Kyle Glenn

Back by popular demand, The Sidekick Troupe is restaging two of our award winning parody musicals in conjunction with each other - The unofficial unauthorized film-to-stage adaptation of Barbie’s Princess & The Pauper and Les Femmes Mousquetaires: A parody adaptation of Barbie and the Three Musketeers. Both shows follow female heroines in their journeys of discovering who they are and who they want to be. In Princess & The Pauper our heroines, Erika and Anneliese, work in tandem to try to save the kingdom from the evil Royal Advisor, Preminger. In Les Femmes Mousquetaires, our heroine Corinne, bands together with three other women who share her dream of being the first women musketeers in France, secretly training and uncovering a plot against the prince. These musical parodies are commemorative jukeboxes of classic Barbie music from our childhood celebrating all the silly and heartfelt things we love about Barbie.

All for one - and one for all!

Five Sessions (A War in Therapy) by Jaime Estades

By Barrio Independent Productions

An explosive and deeply human drama!

Raw, confrontational, and theatrical to its core, Five Sessions turns the stage into a site of resistance and demands the audience stay present.

The playwright, Jaime Estades is a Puerto Rican writer, labor and community activist who has devoted his life to advocacy, education, health, and leadership training. He currently teaches master’s-level clinical and advocacy students at Columbia University (CSSW), Law and Social Work Advocacy, and is a former PhD professor of Social Policy and Research at NYU. Mr. Eddie Torres will direct the play.

"Five Sessions" is not a polite play—it is a confrontation staged in real time. Estades’ provocation lands with surgical force: “Would slaves in the South have felt better about slavery if they had therapy three times a week?” The line functions as a dramatic rupture—there is no answer, only reckoning.

"Five Sessions" cuts straight into the contradictions of the mental-health system and the society that frames it. As a theatrical work, it exposes the limits of therapy when structural injustice remains untreated and state responsibility is deflected onto the individual.

Set in present-day New York City, it traps two persons in a confined theatrical space and dares the audience to witness the collision. Across five charged therapy sessions, Christine Kennedy—a young, white, Ivy-League–trained therapist armed with theory, credentials, and good intentions—faces Vidal “Super” Estrella, a Latino building superintendent, labor organizer, and suicidal man shaped by exploitation, grief, and systemic abandonment. It forces audiences, clinicians, and policymakers alike to confront the inadequacy of care without justice, treatment without rights.

Director: Eddie Torres.

Mr. Torres’s recent theater credits include the California premiere of Water by the Spoonful and the World Premiere of The Happiest Song Plays Last, both by Pulitzer Prize Winner Quiara Alegría Hudes, as well as MacBeth for The Public Theater’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit, and a workshop of Like They Magical for Playwrights Realm in New York City, in addition to an extensive career.

Cast: Belange Rodriguez, Ivan Goris, Bill Blechingberg and Kyle Glenn

Back by popular demand, The Sidekick Troupe is restaging two of our award winning parody musicals in conjunction with each other - The unofficial unauthorized film-to-stage adaptation of Barbie’s Princess & The Pauper and Les Femmes Mousquetaires: A parody adaptation of Barbie and the Three Musketeers. Both shows follow female heroines in their journeys of discovering who they are and who they want to be. In Princess & The Pauper our heroines, Erika and Anneliese, work in tandem to try to save the kingdom from the evil Royal Advisor, Preminger. In Les Femmes Mousquetaires, our heroine Corinne, bands together with three other women who share her dream of being the first women musketeers in France, secretly training and uncovering a plot against the prince. These musical parodies are commemorative jukeboxes of classic Barbie music from our childhood celebrating all the silly and heartfelt things we love about Barbie.

All for one - and one for all!

Back by popular demand, The Sidekick Troupe is restaging two of our award winning parody musicals in conjunction with each other - The unofficial unauthorized film-to-stage adaptation of Barbie’s Princess & The Pauper and Les Femmes Mousquetaires: A parody adaptation of Barbie and the Three Musketeers. Both shows follow female heroines in their journeys of discovering who they are and who they want to be. In Princess & The Pauper our heroines, Erika and Anneliese, work in tandem to try to save the kingdom from the evil Royal Advisor, Preminger. In Les Femmes Mousquetaires, our heroine Corinne, bands together with three other women who share her dream of being the first women musketeers in France, secretly training and uncovering a plot against the prince. These musical parodies are commemorative jukeboxes of classic Barbie music from our childhood celebrating all the silly and heartfelt things we love about Barbie.

All for one - and one for all!

Synopsis:   It’s the summer of 1984. Gio and Vin are best friends, first cousins, and third generation Italian immigrants. While Gio can navigate this new world, Vin struggles to understand where he belongs. As he spirals into despair and addiction, can the love of his friend restore him to a sense of himself?

Synopsis:   It’s the summer of 1984. Gio and Vin are best friends, first cousins, and third generation Italian immigrants. While Gio can navigate this new world, Vin struggles to understand where he belongs. As he spirals into despair and addiction, can the love of his friend restore him to a sense of himself?

Synopsis:   It’s the summer of 1984. Gio and Vin are best friends, first cousins, and third generation Italian immigrants. While Gio can navigate this new world, Vin struggles to understand where he belongs. As he spirals into despair and addiction, can the love of his friend restore him to a sense of himself?

Synopsis:   It’s the summer of 1984. Gio and Vin are best friends, first cousins, and third generation Italian immigrants. While Gio can navigate this new world, Vin struggles to understand where he belongs. As he spirals into despair and addiction, can the love of his friend restore him to a sense of himself?

Synopsis:   It’s the summer of 1984. Gio and Vin are best friends, first cousins, and third generation Italian immigrants. While Gio can navigate this new world, Vin struggles to understand where he belongs. As he spirals into despair and addiction, can the love of his friend restore him to a sense of himself?

Synopsis:   It’s the summer of 1984. Gio and Vin are best friends, first cousins, and third generation Italian immigrants. While Gio can navigate this new world, Vin struggles to understand where he belongs. As he spirals into despair and addiction, can the love of his friend restore him to a sense of himself?

Synopsis:   It’s the summer of 1984. Gio and Vin are best friends, first cousins, and third generation Italian immigrants. While Gio can navigate this new world, Vin struggles to understand where he belongs. As he spirals into despair and addiction, can the love of his friend restore him to a sense of himself?

Synopsis:   It’s the summer of 1984. Gio and Vin are best friends, first cousins, and third generation Italian immigrants. While Gio can navigate this new world, Vin struggles to understand where he belongs. As he spirals into despair and addiction, can the love of his friend restore him to a sense of himself?

Synopsis:   It’s the summer of 1984. Gio and Vin are best friends, first cousins, and third generation Italian immigrants. While Gio can navigate this new world, Vin struggles to understand where he belongs. As he spirals into despair and addiction, can the love of his friend restore him to a sense of himself?

Synopsis:   It’s the summer of 1984. Gio and Vin are best friends, first cousins, and third generation Italian immigrants. While Gio can navigate this new world, Vin struggles to understand where he belongs. As he spirals into despair and addiction, can the love of his friend restore him to a sense of himself?

Synopsis:   It’s the summer of 1984. Gio and Vin are best friends, first cousins, and third generation Italian immigrants. While Gio can navigate this new world, Vin struggles to understand where he belongs. As he spirals into despair and addiction, can the love of his friend restore him to a sense of himself?

Synopsis:   It’s the summer of 1984. Gio and Vin are best friends, first cousins, and third generation Italian immigrants. While Gio can navigate this new world, Vin struggles to understand where he belongs. As he spirals into despair and addiction, can the love of his friend restore him to a sense of himself?

Synopsis:   It’s the summer of 1984. Gio and Vin are best friends, first cousins, and third generation Italian immigrants. While Gio can navigate this new world, Vin struggles to understand where he belongs. As he spirals into despair and addiction, can the love of his friend restore him to a sense of himself?

World PREMIERE

The Pushover

Written By John Patrick Shanley

Directed by Kirk Gostkowski

LIMITED OFF-BROADWAY ENGAGEMENT

THE PUSHOVER is a play about three bad-ass women who collide and collude at a spa in New Mexico, and a bare-bones Chinese restaurant in Queens. Dangerous and hungry, their weapons and their passions bleed into each other. They speak the language of the outcast, rough and sexual, and fight to survive, and to love.

There will be no intermission.

No late seating.

No refund or exchanges.

World PREMIERE

The Pushover

Written By John Patrick Shanley

Directed by Kirk Gostkowski

LIMITED OFF-BROADWAY ENGAGEMENT

THE PUSHOVER is a play about three bad-ass women who collide and collude at a spa in New Mexico, and a bare-bones Chinese restaurant in Queens. Dangerous and hungry, their weapons and their passions bleed into each other. They speak the language of the outcast, rough and sexual, and fight to survive, and to love.

There will be no intermission.

No late seating.

No refund or exchanges.

Synopsis:   It’s the summer of 1984. Gio and Vin are best friends, first cousins, and third generation Italian immigrants. While Gio can navigate this new world, Vin struggles to understand where he belongs. As he spirals into despair and addiction, can the love of his friend restore him to a sense of himself?