Three 2026 productions open themselves to different interpretations based on whether you recognize their directors on stage. 

Which is tough, because auteur visages aren’t the most famous, even amongst diehard theatergoers.

Director Mario Banushi walked on near the end of his Mami at the Under the Radar Festival, without actually revealing his identity. But clocking his relationship to what we’re watching clarifies that the archival photograph accompanying his entrance seems to be his mother (thus, the title). Given Mami’s abstracted means of expression, an autobiographical reading that the entire show may be about the creator’s matriarch constitutes the most explicit interpretive material granted to the audience.

Another production at Under the Radar, Reconstructing also poses a question that can be asked only if you notice that co-director Rachel Chavkin plays herself, while co-director Zhailon Levingston is embodied by Ato Blankson-Wood (the sole member of the ensemble not cast as a version of themselves?). While Ato’s known in his own right, Reconstructing never explicates this self-casting difference; how does the decision intersect with the material’s questioning of balanced collaboration?

By the time the two-and-a-half-hour Seagull: True Story ends at The Public Theater, you may have forgotten that it starts with an introduction from who claims to be director Alexander Molochnikov, immediately establishing what’s to come as a play within a play…in a play about a theater-maker wrestling with the proper distance between plays and IRL reality.

Plus, there’s meaning to be mined in Molochnikov’s choice to link himself with the figure who similarly direct-address narrates the rest of Seagull: True Story.