Playwrights and theater artists from Argentina, Brazil, Iran and across the United States will be featured in January at the 11th annual Under the Radar festival, its producers at the Public Theater announced on Thursday. The 12-day cornucopia of experimental works will also include the start of a new performance series, Incoming!, which showcases works-in-progress by writers, comedians, poets and theater collectives.
Among the highlights of the festival, which will run Jan. 7 to 18, is “Cineastas,” created by the Argentine theater director Mariano Pensotti, which renders the lives of four filmmakers over the course of a year in Buenos Aires. Actors shift between their characters’ real lives and scenes from their characters’ films. Another production, “O Jardim” by the Brazilian theater collective Companhia Hiato, uses Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” as a taking-off point to explore memory and heritage through stories from three generations of a family.
Another show, “Timeloss,” by the Iranian playwright and director Amir Reza Koohestani and the Mehr Theater Group, imagines a reunion of actors years after they starred in Mr. Koohestani’s acclaimed play “Dance on Glasses,” which toured internationally for four years. And “A (radically condensed and expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” created by the director Daniel Fish, uses audio recordings of the writer David Foster Wallace (whose collection of essays inspired its title) and a group of actors to illuminate the writer and his literary style. (The show ran at the Chocolate Factory theater in Queens in 2012; Wallace committed suicide in 2008.)
Many other festival works, adventurous in spirit and acclaimed in their originating countries and cities, will be mounted at the Public and a nearby space in the East Village, La MaMa Experimental Theater. The actor and writer Taylor Mac will also perform in the festival at New York Live Arts, presenting his work “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music: 1900-1950’s,” which will explore tunes from the early 20th century. The show represents the start of a much larger piece that Mr. Mac envisions – a 24-hour performance featuring the last 240 years of popular music.
The new Incoming! series will include works by Lucy Alibar and Daniel Koren; the theater collectives DarkMatter and Deconstructive Theater Project; and the Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble, which draws on the May 2014 killings by Elliot Rodger in California to explore masculinity, insecurity and longing, according to the Public’s news release.