The annual Grad Acting Alumni Cabaret/Variety Hour/Exhibition of Extreme Talent is the closing night of our Studio Tisch 2026 summer season. The cabaret is a crazy, fun evening of carefree jollity where we celebrate the diverse talents of our alumni, ranging from the incredibly sophisticated to the appallingly demented. Come one, come all!

What happens when we stop sweeping Shakespeare's shit under the rug?

One actor performs The Godfather. Live. Solo. Every word. Every gesture.

Written and Performed by Ryan Garbayo
Directed by Danielle Skraastad

What happens when the person you’ve spent your life trying to save disappears—and you have to figure out how to save yourself?

UNTITLED/CUBISH is a new autobiographical solo play that blends raw storytelling, humor, and theatrical invention to explore love, addiction, family, fatherhood, and survival. Through shifting perspectives, unexpected characters, and memories that refuse to stay in the past, Garbayo examines what it means to build a life in the aftermath of chaos.

This special one-night-only event is the first public reading of a new work in development. 

Audience members will experience the piece in its earliest form and are invited to witness—and help shape—the next stage of its artistic journey.

A story about losing yourself, finding your voice, and discovering that healing can begin long after the curtain falls.

The lives of a concerned mother, a disturbed son, a burgeoning “pastor,” and a 3x-widowed benefactress church mouse collide when they join forces to birth a new congregation in this epic tale of ambition, love, hate, success, winning, women, marriage, parenthood, money, taste, revenge, addiction, and mortality.

Lizzy and Olivia collaborate with one of the great and terrifying playwrights of our time. You’ve never seen anything like it. Featuring Reece Dos Santos, Brandon Burk, Maryn Shaw, Olivia Scicolone, and Elizabeth Jarrett.

It’s Blind Date, everyone's favorite reality dating show! Anna and Dominic meet and quickly make a connection. But she's keeping a secret. Will they be able to accept each other as they truly are? This fast-paced play questions privilege, acceptance, and what it means to be real with another person.

Directed by Evan Cummings
Featuring: Andrew Ramcharan Guilarte, Anna Tilley, Christian Demarais and Victoria Mack.

One actor performs The Godfather. Live. Solo. Every word. Every gesture.

A few months back, a group of five actors got together in midtown and started to play. It seems an acting company is taking shape, and this summer we have a new piece of theater - about the fate of all humanity - in development.

Come see the workshop production of The Lives & Death of Bastien Solier. 

Part biopic, part psychological examination of America's original "Succession" story. BILLY charts the 40-year rise of William Henry “Billy” Vanderbilt from a Staten Island farmer to a railroad robber barron even richer than his father, the infamous Cornelius Vanderbilt. From a transatlantic reunion on a luxury yacht in 1853, to an interrogation inside a speeding train car in 1882, BILLY provides a portrait of the origins of private wealth in Gilded Age capitalism — a close-up on the emotional moments of a man generally thought to have none. What happens to a family when it becomes a mega-corporation? What matters more, a father's approval or a nation's?

A series of mysterious debilitating seizures and a freak elevator accident send actor Dede Lovejoy on an off-road scavenger hunt for healing. From sound baths to bean diets, this deeply personal solo play traces one woman’s unconventional recovery, as she flips the bird to western medicine and swan dives into otherworldly remedies to reintegrate body, mind and soul. A mystical post-traumatic-stress-fantasia featuring bad choices, safety tips, spirit guides and shamanism—with cameos by polyamory and The Patriarchy. Written and performed by Dede Lovejoy (The Wire, The Blacklist, Daredevil Born Again).

A few months back, a group of five actors got together in midtown and started to play. It seems an acting company is taking shape, and this summer we have a new piece of theater - about the fate of all humanity - in development.

Come see the workshop production of The Lives & Death of Bastien Solier. 

One actor performs The Godfather. Live. Solo. Every word. Every gesture.

One actor performs The Godfather. Live. Solo. Every word. Every gesture.

When your beloved daughter suddenly decides to break off all contact, what’s a caring mother to do?

My Daughter Hates Me: A Mother’s Story, by Belinda Munsell, is about family estrangement and a mother who tried to create the perfect family. The struggle to be perfect took a toll, leaving her daughter to avoid her for years.

Now she wants to try to make contact again, before time runs out. Will her attempt to connect be successful?

Sophia loves to sing.

Unfortunately, she's been very busy lately.

Stop distracting her!

She needs some space. 

Ella has just embarked on her first year of medical school, where she and her gross anatomy team get a little too close to their cadaver. A dark comedy about family, friendship and the cycle of life. Adapted from the 2016 NYU Freeplay Festival piece of the same name, this 10 Year Anniversary Staged Reading will celebrate the new teleplay version of Rigor Mortis!

When your beloved daughter suddenly decides to break off all contact, what’s a caring mother to do?

My Daughter Hates Me: A Mother’s Story, by Belinda Munsell, is about family estrangement and a mother who tried to create the perfect family. The struggle to be perfect took a toll, leaving her daughter to avoid her for years.

Now she wants to try to make contact again, before time runs out. Will her attempt to connect be successful?

The Ceiling: A Passion Play is a raw, darkly funny, and theatrically inventive two-hander about grief, love, and the fragile stories we build to survive. In the wake of an unthinkable loss, a young couple’s Brooklyn apartment quite literally cracks open—revealing a surreal passage between worlds where the boundaries between reality, memory, and the afterlife begin to blur. As they struggle to repair both their ceiling and their relationship, the play spirals through therapy sessions, auditions, absurd encounters, and moments of piercing intimacy. With actors transforming roles in full view and a hauntingly playful theatricality, The Ceiling asks: how do we live with what cannot be fixed—and what if the break itself is the only way through?

In the wake of devasting losses, Eleanor, the last of the Halcyons of Westchester County, puts on a show at the local library, performing roles she played in acting school. Not the lark she'd hoped for, the evening offers up shocking discoveries as family, ex-friends, employees and community members replace Eleanor's theatrics with the truth. Written by Lynn Hawley, featuring an expert cast of seven.

3 Actors clown their way through 3 of Chekhov’s short stories—Gooseberries, The Play, and Verochka. Directed by Pauli Pontrelli. Featuring: Sam Im, Christian Frost, and Mallory Avnet.

A dozen short films improvised in and around Grand Central Station.

This project began as a way to log more hours behind the camera, and to spend creative time with friends and artists who inspire me. Over the years, it has become an ongoing and evolving experiment in finding new ways to invent and tell stories on film, and a reacquaintance with what’s really, actually essential in the process. Come for the generous and excellent work by the actors, stay for some of the lessons we’ve learned along the way.