Starstuff

Starstuff is a new play from No.11 Productions, a New York ensemble that makes original works and adaptations together. No single playwright is credited. The company built the piece as a group, and both the theater and the company bill it as a new myth. Its heroine, Star, goes looking for her own identity after a string of falls.

It is a limited engagement in Theater C at 59E59 Theaters, presented as an Off-Off Broadway production. The company's production list through 2025 does not include the title, so this looks like the first staging, although nobody bills it as a world premiere. The first two performances are sold as First Look performances.

Star is the center of the play. Her falls push her into a search for who she is, and the company stages that search on a cosmic scale. The falls carry her through very different places, from a mountaintop to the DMV. The company frames the journey as a playful look at the humanity people share.

Four performers tell the story. Individual roles have not been published, so who plays Star and who plays everyone else she meets is something to find out in the room.

Because the script grew out of the ensemble's own work, the credit reads Created by No.11 Productions rather than naming an author. The form is an ensemble play for four performers, running without an intermission.

The themes are the sky above and the self within, and the ties that link people to one another and to the world around them. The mythology angle is deliberate: several post-show guests come from outside theater to talk about the ideas behind the show.

The staging is highly visual and expressionist, built on what the company calls its trademark whimsy and stage magic. Music and sound design are original to the piece, and Neads supplies the show's visual art; for earlier No.11 productions she made art, props and puppets.

Theater C is a black box and the smallest of the three theaters at 59E59. It seats up to 48 with the audience on one side and up to 53 with seating on two sides.

The company dates to 2008, when a group of Skidmore College alumni that included Congress, Emmons and Neads started it. Before reaching 59E59, its work played FringeNYC, FRIGID New York, Capital Fringe and school tours.

Under the Co-Op program at 59E59, No.11 is a resident company, which means one or two productions a year in the building's Theater B or Theater C. Its earlier productions there were Ye Bear & Ye Cubb in 2022, Pair in 2023 and Sugarcraft in 2025. Sugarcraft took its inspiration from a recipe collection dating from 1718, Mrs. Mary Eales' Receipts.