After all the Tony-chasing reaches its finish line in early June comes the time when New York audiences and performers traditionally pack up and leave for festivals or simply a little vacation. But in the midst of that humid lull, there is still plenty to see if you stay in town — whether inside with the benefit of AC or en plein air, where the venues are getting more plentiful. After a year of renovations at the Delacorte, Shakespeare in the Park will return in August with a star-saturated cast, while further to the south and out over the water, Little Island is ramping up its programming. Essential new plays return to Clubbed Thumb, along with a smattering of productions Off and Off-Off and — though it’s the slow season uptown — you will still, almost inevitably, have the option of seeing a Hollywood star come to Broadway.

May

At Summerworks, Business Ideas, Not Not Jane’s, and Cold War Choir Practice

Through July 1
The Wild Project

Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival generates exciting, eccentric gems every year, all crammed ingeniously into the powerful little Lower East Side shoebox that is the Wild Project. (It fills up fast; best to book tickets early.) This year, Milo Cramer (creator of last season’s splendid School Pictures) has already opened the festival with Business Ideas, their new play about a mother and daughter engaged in a variety of get-rich-quick schemes while the long-suffering barista in the café they frequent struggles to escape the grind. Next up, the spiky satirist Mara Nelson Greenberg (Do You Feel Anger?) premieres Not Not Jane’s, in which a young woman attempts to start a community center in a world run by and for billionaires. Ro Reddick’s Cold War Choir Practice rounds out this summer’s trio: Reaganomics and roller-skating collide with spycraft and, yes, choir practice in this ambitious play with music. —Sara Holdren

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Call Me Izzy

Previews May 24
Studio 54

From Hacks to Watchmen, Jean Smart’s portraits of funny and fearsome women have taken over television in the last few years; now she’s coming to Broadway for the first time since a 2000 run in The Man Who Came to Dinner. This solo show about a woman in rural Louisiana with a secret is written by Jamie Wax and directed by Sarna Lapine. —Jackson McHenry

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The Counterfeit Opera and The Gospel at Colonus

May 29–June 15 / July 8–26
The Amph at Little Island

Little Island’s summer season is really promising, with a new series of short plays and songs by Suzan-Lori Parks and her band SLP & The Joyful Noise, as well as the first New York outing of an original bluegrass adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s Onegin, written by Sarah Gancher (The Wind and the Rain) and directed by Rachel Chavkin. But first, look for The Counterfeit Opera: Dustin Wills and Dan Schlosberg follow up their virtuosic and delightfully zany one-man The Marriage of Figaro with a new twist on the wolfish satire The Beggar’s Opera, directed by Wills with an original score by the musical mastermind Schlosberg and a new book and lyrics by playwright Kate Tarker. Then the Pulitzer finalist Shayok Misha Chowdhury will direct a new production of Lee Breuer and Bob Telson’s thunderous The Gospel at Colonus, the soaring musical adaptation of Sophocles that premiered at Breuer’s company Mabou Mines in 1983, eventually making it to Broadway, where it featured the Blind Boys of Alabama. —S.H.

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Prince Faggot

May 30–July 6
Playwrights Horizons

What happens if the heir to the throne is… well… you know? Jordan Tannahill’s play, set in the very near future, asks how queerness intersects with the very core of colonial power. Though it’s hard to imagine how that will all play out in this production, a team-up of the SoHo Rep and Playwrights Horizons that the producers are calling a “meta-theatrical satire,” it’ll be directed by Public Obscenities’s Shayok Misha Chowdhury with a queer, trans, and nonbinary cast that includes expert performers like K. Todd Freeman and David Greenspan. —J.M.

June

Lowcountry

June 4–July 13
Atlantic Theater

Described as a “dark, twisted romcom,” Abby Rosebrock’s new play imagines a chance connection via app between an actress working gig jobs and a disgraced rural high-school teacher. Rosebrock, born in South Carolina, has explored similar dark-comedic Appalachian territory in Blue Ridge. Jo Bonney, of The Cost of Living, directs. —J.M.

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Trophy Boys

June 5–July 13
MCC Theater

A group of boys on an elite high school’s debate team step up to face a loaded prompt: “Feminism has failed women.” But in Emmanuelle Mattana’s play, making its American debut after a run in Australia, those boys are all played by femme and nonbinary actors, sending up the cursed masculinity of preppy overachievers. MCC has found an apt director in Danya Taymor, who’s done sensitive and cutting work about high schoolers (in John Proctor is the Villain) and debate obsessives (in Heroes of The Fourth Turning). —J.M.

August

Twelfth Night

August 7–September 14
Delacorte Theater

The Delacorte has had a glow-up, and Shakespeare in the Park will show it off with a star-heavy Twelfth Night (its tickets still free as ever, if you can make it through the lines). Lupita Nyong’o, Sandra Oh, Peter Dinklage, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson lead the cast in Saheem Ali’s production, and Junior Nyong’o, Lupita’s brother, will play the twin of her shipwrecked heroine, as disguises, desire, deceptions, mischief, and music play out in midsummer Illyria. —S.H.

Also opening this summer

➼ Eurydice (Signature Theater; in previews May 13, opening June 2)
➼ Prosperous Fools (Theater for a New Audience, in previews June 1, opening June 12)
➼Duke & Roya (Lucille Lortel Theatre; in previews June 10, opening June 24)
➼Heathers: the Musical (New World Stages; in previews June 22, opening June 30)
➼Ava: The Secret Conversations (New York City Center; in previews July 30, opening August 7)
➼Mamma Mia! (Winter Garden Theatre; in previews August 2, opening August 14)

 Shakespeare in the Brand-New Delacorte, promising programming at Clubbed Thumb and Little Island, and Jean Smart on Broadway.