OCTOBER 8, 2025

Hello, Whisperites,

Last weekend, while running around to see new October shows, I dropped into the NYU Skirball Center for one of the stranger and more delightful theater pieces I’ve seen this year: asses.masses, an extended video-game-slash-participatory-theater event about unionist donkeys. It is both a video game, created by Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim, and a performance of the very collegiate experience of watching someone else play a video game and itching to tell them what to do. The game, which starts out on a Stardew Valley–esque farm where a herd of donkeys have found themselves out of work because the owner is replacing them with machines, is projected onto a screen at the front of an auditorium, but there’s only one controller, which is placed at the foot of the stage. Audience members have to take turns playing — that is, helping organize the rest of the donkeys into an act of resistance against the human — while everyone else watches. 

At my performance, people in the crowd took it upon themselves to read the lines of different donkey characters, and when there were crucial decisions to be made, everyone started shouting their own preferences: Should we sympathize with fellow donkey Sad Ass’s doubts about the movement or tell him to buck up? Our player told him to get it together. When, at least during our game, the protest didn’t go so well, the game swerved into other genres. Players had to navigate a Mario-style platform and engage in Pokémon-ish combat, and when we lost a member of our herd to the Astral Plane (one of many ass-based puns), I watched Kimberly Akimbo’s own Justin Cooley try his best to land a high score in a mini-game that very much resembled Dance Dance Revolution. Like any good video-game binge, the piece is also a durational saga (with scheduled snack breaks that last as long as the audience decides) stretching for roughly eight hours. I went on a sunny Saturday and could only stay for three hours because I had to meet a friend and then see another show, but I regret leaving and am very worried about the fate of all those donkeys. If you have a chance to see another playthrough of asses.masses on tour, please stick it through with your donkey union to the end.

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The latest grosses are here! Jackson McHenry, Jason P. Frank, and Zach Schiffman discuss.

Jackson McHenry: Nice to see that Oh, Mary! is still a pretty solid draw with Hannah Solow. Stranger Things is at 68 percent capacity — must be rough now that kids are back in school.

Jason P. Frank: Curious how long Mincemeat is going to keep playing. Will they try to keep it going past the original cast?

Zach Schiffman: Hell’s Kitchen is nosediving. 

Jason: I think they were probably getting a boost from the shows Alicia Keys was performing after.

Jackson: Woof, yeah, their future plans can't be just having her constantly come back and sing after it.

By Jackson McHenry

Photo: Andy Henderson

A sequence in the latter half of Dylan Mulvaney’s autobiographical show, The Least Problematic Woman in the World, offers a neat summary of the sudden recent rug pull in the relationship between corporate America and trans people. In the show, Mulvaney has just decided to start transitioning and finds herself approached by a chipper avatar of an advertiser, a character played by Mulvaney in prerecorded video, who promises her, since she’s “kind, approachable, and well mannered,” that she’s the perfect face for “trans palatability.” “FUCK YES,” Mulvaney responds to the screen. “I mean, yay!” Suddenly, she’s thrust onto a talk show, where she has to respond politely to invasive questions from a perky blonde interviewer (also Mulvaney on video in a different wig), and given an ominous contract to sign in which she promises to “relentlessly exploit her identity through social media.” For the next few minutes, Mulvaney putters around the stage like an animatronic housewife just escaped from the Tomorrowland section of Disneyland, shilling for whatever products are thrust into her hands: “trans palatable mascara”; the “tranpon, for the girl who has everything except a bleeding uterus”; a treadmill because “maybe it’s my responsibility to normalize trans people in sports?”; and finally, in a gesture accompanied with a drumroll as if we’re seeing Sweeney Todd’s right arm become complete again, Mulvaney’s handed a beer.

By Jason P. Frank

Photo: Pari Dukovic for New York Magazine

Joshua Henry is a vocal powerhouse. The 41-year-old earned Tony nominations for his roles in 2010’s The Scottsboro Boys and the 2018 Carousel revival. (“He’s an extraordinary Billy, hulking and hurting, unafraid of delving into the character’s ugliness and tackling his moody songs with both force and grace,” our critic Sara Holdren wrote about the latter part.) Now, Henry’s playing another down-on-his-luck turn-of-the-century character, Coalhouse Walker Jr., in the Ragtime revival directed by Lincoln Center Theater’s new artistic director Lear deBessonet. Coalhouse, an optimistic piano player, is put through a Job-like list of trials over the course of the show, culminating in his 11 o’clock number, “Make Them Hear You.” The part’s vocal range goes from a low G to a high A2. “It’s one of the rangiest roles I’ve ever done,” Henry says.

➽ Beetlejuice the Musical begins its third Broadway engagement, this time at the Palace Theatre, October 8.

➽ Sharon Kenny and Kirsten Guenther's The Real Housewives of New York City: An Opera will premiere with a one-night-only concert at The Cutting Room in New York October 20.

➽ Bess Wohl's Liberation will begin performances at the James Earl Jones Theatre.