The Playground hasn’t even opened at the United Solo Theatre Festival yet, and our Friday, November 6 performance at Theatre Row is completely sold out. Thank you to everyone who grabbed a seat, forwarded an email, or told a friend in the city that they had to see this show. You did that.
For everyone who missed out, here’s the good news: the festival has added a second performance.
Tuesday, November 10, 2026 · 8:30 PM
Theatre Row · 410 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036
So what’s all the fuss about?
Meet Joan. She’s a Berkeley ethnography professor, which means she’s trained to study other cultures. Then her mathematician husband takes a job at a hedge fund, and Joan and their four-year-old son land on the Upper East Side, the most exotic culture she’s ever encountered.
So she does what she does best and starts taking field notes.
On the playground benches she meets the competitive mothers, the nannies who do the actual parenting, and the children of the 1%, who already know exactly where they stand. She also meets the people who keep that whole world of privilege running, many of them undocumented. As ICE enforcement closes in, their lives are getting more frightening by the day.
Joan is funny, sharp and very human. She thinks she’s above all of it, until she has to make a decision that will change her life and the lives of everyone around her. The question she ends up facing is one the play asks all of us: How much of your integrity would you trade for a life of wealth and comfort?
It’s a New York story, set a few miles from Theatre Row, and it’s coming home.
One actor. A whole city of voices.
Anna Botsford plays Joan, live and alone on stage, for the entire evening. Around her, a full chorus of voices and projected images fills in Joan’s New York: the Britneys, the hedge fund husbands, the nannies, the kids. Eli Woods wrote the original score, and Jim Dalglish, the play’s writer and director, designed the projections.
Critics have noticed:
“Botsford really carries the play... and she does so spectacularly.”
— Provincetown Magazine
“Ms. Botsford earned a well-deserved standing ovation on opening night. Mr. Dalglish’s play will leave you thinking well after the theater lights come back up.”
— The Enterprise
From the Cape to 42nd Street
The Playground had a sold-out world premiere at Cotuit Center for the Arts. This fall it toured Cape Cod with a run at Cape Rep Theatre and stops in Barnstable and Provincetown. Now it’s an official selection of the United Solo Theatre Festival, the international festival of one-person shows at Theatre Row in the heart of the Theater District.
Don’t wait on this one
The theater is intimate, and the first show sold out before opening night. November 10 is the last New York performance currently scheduled.
Know someone in New York? Send them this post. Word of mouth sold out the first show, and it can fill the second one too.
Make a night of it: Theatre Row is minutes from Times Square and surrounded by restaurants, so come for dinner and stay for Joan.
See you on 42nd Street!
