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Please support our end of year campaign to raise $45,000 by June 30th.

Join us on Tuesday, September 30, 2025, for an unforgettable evening at The Chocolate Factory Theater’s Fourth Annual Gala as we proudly honor this year’s Artist In Industry Award recipient: Sheila Lewandowski, Co-founder and Executive Director Emerita. Sheila’s vision, passion, and tireless dedication are the very foundation of The Chocolate Factory Theater. Over the decades, she has poured her heart and soul into building a home for our community of artists and groundbreaking work—transforming a dream into a vital cultural institution.

Ayano Elson’s Control tunes the edges of tension in her time-bending premiere at the Chocolate Factory.

I have admittedly never been to the Chocolate Factory in my ten years in New York City. Still, I can see this might not be a typical setup. Ayano has the chairs placed so they span the right side of the raised platform stage and onto the concrete floor in three rows including pillows on the ground. When we came in to find our seats, we saw that Amelia was already in the show.

Steven Wendt and Wes Day’s Plato Caves: Screens vs Shadows was, on the sunny Sunday afternoon performance I attended, a massive delight for a rapt audience of children. The event is The Chocolate Factory Theater’s first venture into theatre for young audiences (TYA), and unlike other TYA shows I’ve attended (including in my own childhood), this one gave the adults in the room something real to think about: our dependence on screens.

In Ayano Elson’s Control, a minimal exterior scaffolds a sensuous core. The four dancers (Cayleen Del Rosario, Amelia Heintzelman, Owen Prum, and evan ray suzuki) cycle through repeated movements that are simple, often minute, and restrained. We, the audience, can feel a psychic intensity in each sequence—an impulse, ticking beneath the dancing body’s surface, that intuits and responds to its co-presence with performance space and performing peers.

In “Nothing: more,” Autumn Knight and her collaborators and co-choreographers Kayla Farrish, Dominica Greene, and Jasmine Hearn let their imaginations roam in an interactive set that evokes an empty, after-hours gallery.

Imagine for a moment how you might inhabit the world of Britney Spears. Phil Collins? Beyoncé? Insane Clown Posse? The performance artist Neal Medlyn has done it all (and then some). Medlyn’s performances are singular events that traverse popular sensibilities and creative disciplines with undercurrents of philosophical curiosity and devotional irreverence.

A thrilling, playful exploration of the process of becoming. Nicole Serratore reviews.

Please support our end of year campaign to raise $45,000 by December 31st.