NYC’s Under The Radar Festival Uses Lessons From The Past To Shape The Future

In January, the NYC Under the Radar Festival presented some of the most innovative and thought-provoking work on the contemporary stage. This year’s edition, the festival’s largest to date, featured 30 productions across 24 venues. Three works, in particular, stood out as emblematic of Under the Radar’s forward-looking spirit.

The Visitors QPAC 2025 – Redhanded Productions.

The Visitors

The award-winning production traveled more than 20 hours from Sydney, Australia, to New York, bringing a story that feels acutely resonant for U.S. audiences.

Created by First Nations playwright Jane Harrison and directed by Wesley Enoch, a leading voice in Indigenous theater, The Visitors examines a pivotal moment in Australian history: January 1788, when British colonizers first arrived.

Onstage, seven Aboriginal leaders — barefoot yet dressed in business attire — gather as a mysterious fleet of nawi (giant ships) begins to fill the bay. 

The play lingers in the moment before irrevocable change, when invasion is imminent but not yet complete, allowing the audience to sit inside the tension, uncertainty, and moral weight of an impossible decision: whether to accept or fight the strangers.

The Visitors QPAC 2025 – Redhanded Productions.

The characters open the play speaking their tribal languages before shifting into conversational English. Their discussion unfolds like an endless corporate brainstorm, where every possible choice carries irreversible consequences and no clear resolution is within reach.

By focusing on the earliest days of colonization, The Visitors foreshadows the dark realities of violence and disease to come, using the past to pose unresolved questions, including how Indigenous communities came to allow invaders onto their land.

The play ultimately offers its own answer. Deeply connected to their country, the seven leaders believe the newcomers cannot remain on land that is not theirs.

In the final moments, the performers turn their business suits inside out, revealing Indigenous patterns beneath (costume design by Elizabeth Gadsby) and stand tall to welcome invaders who never appear onstage.

Most of the cast (Najwa Adams-Ebel, Sean Dow, Kyle Morrison, Beau Dean Riley Smith, James Slee-Stanley, Guy Simon, and Zoe Walters) share Aboriginal heritage.

Running through Feb. 1 at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, The Visitors is co-produced by Moogahlin Performing Arts and Sydney Theatre Company. 

All That Fall, by Samuel Beckett, at the NYC Under the Radar Festival 2026. Created by Mabou Mines collective, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, sound design by Bruce Odland and lighting by Jennifer Tipton.

All That Fall

In All That Fall, Samuel Beckett’s 1957 radio play, the stage itself becomes the central presence. 

For this production, Mabou Mines, the legendary New York theater collective, collaborates with director JoAnne Akalaitis, who relocates the action from rural Ireland to Nova Scotia. 

The shift is geographic rather than conceptual: Akalaitis preserves the original’s disembodied logic, staging the play as a living soundscape rather than a traditional drama.

What emerges is a production that honors Beckett’s resistance to spectacle while finding a theatrical language of its own, one in which atmosphere replaces action.

Written expressly for broadcast (and long protected by the Beckett estate as an auditory work) the play remains one of his least frequently staged, in part because it resists conventional theatrical embodiment.

All That Fall, by Samuel Beckett, at the NYC Under the Radar Festival 2026. Created by Mabou Mines collective, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, sound design by Bruce Odland and lighting by Jennifer Tipton.

A miniature village diorama, designed by Thomas Dunn, fills the stage, while performers are present as voices. Bruce Odland’s sound design and Jennifer Tipton’s lighting do much of the expressive work, shaping both mood and rhythm.

The piece follows Maddy Rooney, an aging, physically struggling woman, on her slow journey to the local train station to meet her blind husband, Dan. Along the way, she encounters neighbors who fill the air with small talk, complaints, and uneasy humor. 

The train is delayed. When the Rooneys reunite, they make their way home, carrying with them hints of an unspoken tragedy — possibly the death of a child — that lingers unresolved. 

As in much of Beckett’s work, narrative movement is minimal; the weight falls instead on decay, repetition, and the quiet cruelty of ordinary life.

The ensemble of the world premiere of Ulysses at the Fisher Center at Bard in 2024. Photo by Maria Baranova.

Ulysses

If you are among the many readers who have approached James Joyce’s Ulysses only to abandon it, daunted by its puzzles and digressions, Elevator Repair Service’s nearly three-hour stage version offers a bracing second chance. 

The production moves briskly through a single day in Dublin, June 16, 1904, following the wandering paths of young intellectual Stephen Dedalus and the quietly observant Leopold Bloom.

ERS founder John Collins directs the company-created work with co-direction and dramaturgy by Scott Shepherd, who introduces the evening by reminding the audience that “every reading of Ulysses is a misreading.” 

This adaptation, he notes, embraces that idea cheerfully, continuing the confusion and controversy Joyce clearly intended.

Christopher-Rashee Stevenson and Stephanie Weeks in the world premiere of Ulysses at the Fisher Center at Bard in 2024. Photo by Maria Baranova.

Seven performers (Dee Beasnael, Kate Benson, Maggie Hoffman, Vin Knight, Scott Shepherd, Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, Stephanie Weeks) begin seated for a straightforward reading, only to be pulled into action as the text takes over. 

Pints are drained, punches thrown, and Joyce’s voices passed from body to body as the ensemble careens through the novel’s many styles. 

The mechanics of the staging keep things buoyant. Joyce’s text is projected across two screens on the back of the theater, sometimes racing ahead as chapters are skipped, accompanied by the familiar sound of tape fast-forwarding. 

A large clock resets the hour as the action jumps through the day. Sound (Ben Williams), lighting (Marika Kent), and fog-filled scenic effects shape the rhythm.

The production’s wildest turn arrives in the second act with the maternity ward episode, staged as comic and grotesque excess: a male actor gives birth onstage as Joyce’s prose mutates through centuries of English.

Maggie Hoffman, Scott Shepherd, Vin Knight, and Stephanie Weeks in the world premiere of Ulysses at the Fisher Center at Bard in 2024. Photo by Maria Baranova.

Nationhood surfaces in fragments through casual anti-Semitism, inflated newsroom rhetoric, and pub talk that slides toward exclusion. Bloom passes through it all as a figure of unresolved belonging.

The evening closes with Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated soliloquy. Her thoughts about men, desire, memory, irritation, and pleasure accumulate until the final “yes” lands not as romance, but as affirmation forged from experience.

ERS’s Ulysses doesn’t make Joyce easy. It makes him playable and, surprisingly, fun.