Cecily Strong and Corey Stoll's Dinner Date Leads Five Theater Streams

Cecily Strong and Corey Stoll star in the audio adaptation of Tom Noonan's two-character play "What Happened Was …," now streaming from the Minetta Lane Theater's Off Broadway revival, one of five theater productions reaching screens this month.

The play traps two law-firm employees — Stoll's Harvard-educated paralegal Michael and Strong's executive assistant Jackie, a Bronx Community College graduate — in a Manhattan apartment on an awkward first date that slowly surfaces hidden dreams and loneliness. Ian Rickson directed the revival, which ran earlier this year. Tim Teeman wrote in his Times review: "Stoll and Strong spikily excel at playing Michael and Jackie's nervy dinner roller coaster, joshing, misreading, then comprehending each other. Their alternating bafflement, suspicion and empathy reveal the rewarding yet perilous cost of honesty."

What else can audiences stream?

"Arcadia" — Tom Stoppard's widely regarded masterpiece arrives on National Theater at Home on Nov. 26. The revival, directed by Carrie Cracknell, opened at the Old Vic in London two months after Stoppard died at 88. Leila Farzad plays the reserved author Hannah; Prasanna Puwanarajah plays the big-talking scholar Bernard. The play runs two narratives in parallel, one in the early 19th century and one in the late 20th. "Although the ideas are high-minded, the comedy is down-to-earth," Houman Barekat wrote in his Times review, adding that the run time "flies by in a flurry of puns, double entendres, acerbic put-downs and Wildean aperçus."

"School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play" — Jocelyn Bioh's 2017 satire, which opened on Broadway in September to acclaim, streams Nov. 10-15 at $59 per ticket. Set at a 1980s Ghanaian boarding school, it follows students whose obsessions with the United States and dangerous beauty standards fuel their pageant participation. Whitney White directs a cast including standouts Jasmine Amy Rogers and Denée Benton. Critic Helen Shaw wrote: "Bioh has joined the first rank of American comic playwrights. She has a particular gift for orchestrating a group for maximum ridiculousness."

"The Pelicot Trial" — Milo Rau and Servane Dècle's documentary theater work distills the four-month 2024 trial, in which all 51 defendants were found guilty, into four hours. Because the French justice system keeps no written transcript of court cases, the Swiss director and French dramaturg drew on researchers, lawyers and journalists who attended, incorporating thousands of pages of notes. The piece ran as a seven-hour reading at Vienna's Festwochen last June, then played the Avignon Festival and NYU Skirball. It will be performed for one night at the Old Vic and livestreamed free worldwide on Nov. 30 at 1 p.m. Eastern on the Young Vic YouTube channel. Rau told The Times last year: "It's an example of patriarchal violence. The more we dive into it, the more we see that it's the tip of the iceberg."

"Falsettos" — James Lapine's 2016 Broadway revival of the William Finn musical returns to BroadwayHD for its 10th anniversary. Christian Borle, Andrew Rannells and Stephanie J. Block lead the cast as a chosen family navigating love and the AIDS epidemic. Charles Isherwood opened his 2016 Times review: "There's hardly a moment in the exhilarating, devastating revival of the musical 'Falsettos' that doesn't approach, or even achieve, perfection."

What does this change for viewers? A Stoppard revival, a Broadway transfer and a major documentary-theater event — all normally geographically gated — are now accessible from home, most of them free or under $60.