Ethan Li

The premise of “Rheology” is simultaneously simple and preposterous: A theater practitioner asks his mother to enact her own death. As the writer, director and performer Shayok Misha Chowdhury says in the off-Broadway play, the audience is gathered at Midtown’s Playwrights Horizons for a “kind of exposure therapy” where his mother will simulate dying to test his hypothesis that he could not survive without her.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, Japanese filmmaker Sho Miyake dreamed of escaping to the beach. Around this time, a producer approached him with the idea of adapting two manga — titled “A View of the Seaside” and “Mr. Ben and His Igloo” — by Yoshiharu Tsuge, the recently deceased Japanese essayist and cartoonist, into a movie.

Is there any place more enticing to spend a Friday evening than among the glitz and glamor of Broadway? Each of its 41 stages promises audiences a night to remember, from contemporary black comedies to reimagined Shakespearean tragedies. But take it from the Arts desk: There’s much more to theater than the shows that call those venues home. After all, the only thing separating Broadway from off-Broadway is audience size.