The best summer theater festivals in NYC

After a special program to celebrate the reopening of Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park, the free annual Battery Dance Festival moves to the North Esplanade of Rockefeller Park for a week of performances by a mix of local and international companies, performing outdoors near the sparkling water at sunset.

The lineup for the 44th edition features multiple U.S. or world premieres, and the participating artists include visitors from the Netherlands, India, Bangladesh, Spain, South Korea and Germany, Taiwan, Romania and Indonesia. The slate includes an August 15 program that celebrates five dance traditions of the southwestern Indian state Kerala: Kalaripayattu, Kutiyattam, Kathakali, Mohiniyattam and Theyyam. All six shows are general admission, and there's a rain date on Sunday, August 17.

Below is a full schedule of the artists and companies that will be performing. Visit the festival's website for additional details. 

Pallavi Krishnan | Photograph: Courtesy of the artist

Tuesday, August 12:
John Manzari & Band, excerpts from Recenter
Pace University Dancing to Connect 
Battery Dance, Sense of Belonging
Faizah Grootens, While You’re Here
Bulareyaung Dance Company, Colors 

Wednesday, August 13:
UNARTE, Verso Roto 
Theater Plauen - Zwickau Ballet Ensemble, Eden
Bulareyaung Dance Company, Colors 
Faizah Grootens, While You’re Here 
Platforma 13, Balkan Ballerinas  

Platforma 13: Balkan Ballerinas | Photograph: Courtesy Marko Pejovic

Thursday, August 14:
Kar' mel Small, La Manta de Reina 
Theater Plauen - Zwickau Ballet Ensemble, Eden 
Platforma 13, Balkan Ballerinas 
UNARTE, Verso Roto 
Buglisi Dance Theatre, Sospiri 
Battery Dance, Empty Hand 

Friday, August 15 (India Day—Dances of Kerala):
Pallavi Krishnan with Jayasree Nair and Annie Sajayan (Mohiniyattam)
Surjith Panikkar (Theyyam)
Pradeesh K. Thiruthiya (Theyyam)
Raam Kumar (Kalaripayattu)
Sooraj Irinjakaluda (Kutiyattam)
Kerala Kalamandalam with Thulasi Kumar and Adyattingal Harinarayanan (Kathakali)

Saturday, August 16:
Mofassal Al Alif, In Search of You
Ô’tänamos, Aeternus Viator 
Battery Dance, Sense of Belonging 
Wan Dance, Mak Long 
Dorchel Haqq, Swallow 
Al-Dal'ouna Dabka Team, Dal'ouna Events 

Faizah Grootens: While You're Here | Photograph: Courtesy Sjoerd Derine

The annual summer showcase for new work returns with a slate of new works, each performed three to five times. Remaining offering include Glory Kadigan's Double-Crossed, a thriller set o a cruise ship; Alicia Foxworth's Ghost Writer, a historical drama about human trafficking in antebellum New York; T.J. Elliott's Retrospective, in which an artist finds himself in a supernatural limbo; and the musical Beyond Perfection (by Kenady Sean, Emily Horton and Kaylee Killingsworth), a tale of rebellion against the romantic algorithms and social controls of a dystopian future. 

La Femme Theatre's free festival showcases the fruits of its development projects for women, thematically united this year by the overaching concept of "agency." The slate comprises: Abigail Duclos's Vengeance (Aug 12), directed by Britt Berke; Tess Inderbitzin's Deja Deja Vu (Aug 13), directed by Mikayla Gold Benson; Zoë Geltman's A Safe Business (Aug 14), directed by Julia Sirna-Frest and featuring English standout Tala Ashe; Jenny Lyn Bader's Buy Nothing, Remember Everything (Aug 15), directed by Ina Marlowe; and Yahney-Marie Sangaré In Time (Aug 16), directed by Will DeVary.

Frigid New York treads the Bard in a festival dedicated to offbeat riffs on the works of Williams Shakespeare, including three versions of Hamlet: Federico Mallet's soapy Hamlet: La Telenovela, performed in Spanish; Rachel Resnik's Hamlet's Dad, a comedic one-woman show; and Margaret Rose Caterisano's The Mousetrap, or Prince Hamlet wrote a dumb play and now we have to do it, which looks at the Danish tragedy from the perspective of the show's traveling players. Also on the lineup are Elsewhere Shakespeare Company's punked-up adaptation of the sexual-harrassment tale Measure for Measure; Rachel Weekley's Two Households, a queer solo take on Romeo and Juliet; Mark Sage's Tempestuous, a three-person drama inspired by The Tempest; Jay Whitehead and Daniel Judes's Unsex'd, in which a pair of Elizabeth boy actors compete to play Lady Macbeth; and the return of the improv comedy As You Will. Two Bard-adjacent offerings complete the slate: Sivan Raz's Anti-Gone, an optimistic spin on Sophoclean tragedy, and Michael Hagins's As You Wish It or The Bride Princess or What You Will, a Shakespeare-style parody of The Princess Bride. 

Last year, NoHo's Gene Frankel Theatre, one of the city's oldest Off-Off venues—it was founded in 1949—came under the new ownership of Onomatopoeia Theatre Company's Thomas R. Gordon. Among Gordon's innovations at the space is this new August festival of 25 original one-act and short plays, which he has selected from more than 100 submissions. The shows are divided into eight blocks; the wrap-up event on August 17 will include awards for the festival's best acting, writing and directing. 

The Tank squeezes more than 60 productions into a three-week festival of work by emerging artists who are female, nonbinary or gender-nonconfirming. The centerpiece is a full production of Lili / Darwin, a poetic solo work by the Brazilian writer-performer Darwin Del Fabro—returning to the stage after a gender transition—that explores parallels between her experience and that of Lili Elbe, the Danish painter and sex-change pioneer portrayed by Eddie Redmayne in the 2015 biopic The Danish Girl. Lead Tank girl Meghan Finn directs. The other shows in the festival are performed only once; visit Visit the Tank's website for full information about them.

The CUNY Graduate Center's Martin E. Segal Theatre Center goes wide with a new annual festival of free alfresco performances by artists from around the world. The French tightrope artist Tatiana Mosio-Bongonga walks the line, and the Senagalese circus troupe Compagnie SenCirk presents separate indoor and outdoor programs; Quebec's Le Cirque Kikasse performs acrobatic and balancing acts on a tricked out food truck. Two groups up the cool factor with actual frozen water: France's Théâtre de l’Entrouvert shares a choreographic project involving feet made of melting ice, whereas performers from the U.K. troupe Kaleider try to construct an arch out of ice and concrete. Italy's Parini Secondo uses jump rope as percussion for a dance piece, and France's Théâtre de la Ville teams up with the Down to Earth team to offer multilingual one-on-one "poetic consultations" in three boroughs. Meanwhile, the Segal Center offers—as a "festival-within-a festival"—a new edition of its annual Prelude series, an unmissable showcase for upcoming avant-garde work that offers the theater and dance equivalent of a coming-attractions sampler. This year's Preludes is devoted to site-specific work by artists from Cuba, France, Iran, Ivory Coast, Brazil and Ukraine in addition to those from the U.S. Check out the festival's website for a full schedule of events and locations. 

Founded in 2006 by experimentalist guru Mac Wellman, this off-kilter minifest features work by playwrights who were recently in Brooklyn College's M.F.A. program. This year, individual sci-fi plays by Ann Marie Dorr, Andrew Hardigg, Claire Greising and Kurt Chiang have been combined into a single omnibus saga directed by Hanna Yurfest and titled The Booming Voice of No One: A Mutant Anthology of Plays on Science Fiction from Brooklyn College.

The sharp-minded actor, monologist and memoirist Iris Bahr (Dai) teams up with Frigid New York to create her own short but sweet festival: a four-day collection of cracked perspectives, each performed by their own actor-writers as solos or two-handers. Promising selections include Roya Hamadani's Manic! and Johnnie Mcnamara's the Heterosexuals. Bahr herself kicks off the proceedings on September 4 in a discussion with two very big-time writers: the dauntingly prolific editor-novelist Kurt Anderson and his onetime Spy magazine colleague, the New Yorker articles editor (and recent Lorne Michaels biographer) Susan Morrison.