If you prefer your plays with movie stars, live on stage reciting lines competently if not necessarily convincingly, or with TV stars magnified on upstage projection screens so you can watch them emote in close-up, or with the whole thing amplified so much that you can’t make sense of what they’re saying—well, there are plenty of shows we can recommend before we get around to Adam Gopnik’s New York. But if it’s deliciously intelligent discourse you want, with wide-ranging allusions (when was the last time you heard someone cite D’Artagnan’s advice from his father on leaving Gascony for Paris?) and occasional high-culture belly laughs, too, then head up to the Rose Building on the Lincoln Center campus and get ready to be charmed and disarmed. Adam Gopnik’s New York is short (70-odd minutes), sweet, provocative, and with a relatively low ticket price.
Gopnik is one of those writers whose pieces can make you interested in subjects you didn’t know you were interested in. As readers of The New Yorker are aware and nonreaders of The New Yorker might not be aware, he began as an art critic but has always specialized in the human condition. “An essayist at a liberal magazine,” is how he modestly puts it. He came to New York as a graduate student from Montreal, storming that fabled magazine’s transom with submissions until they finally printed one and named him art critic soon thereafter.
Actually, he came to New York much earlier. A Philadelphia lad, he relates that his parents bundled him—at the age of 3?—into their Volkswagen Beetle and drove north to attend the opening day of the Guggenheim Museum in 1959. He presents himself as a tot in a velvet suit standing in line, chattering away on the stylistic differences between Calder and Miró. Which is to say, it was preordained that he become an expert in the fine arts. Transplanted to Canada, where he was raised and schooled, he relocated in 1980 to become a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker (and a New Yorker) with the exception of a five-year sojourn in Paris which brought forth his first bestseller, the 2000 Paris to the Moon.
That said, Adam Gopnik’s New York is all New York. Art, snowflakes, Central Park, child raising, pluralism and individualism, and his quest of writing with what he calls “a wild exactitude.” All New York, yes, except when he takes what he calls left turns from the discussion which lead—well, one gets the sense that he has more ready-to-tell stories than time allows, so each performance might differ somewhat. (After decades as a popular lecturer on what his wife and children refer to as his “perpetual tuition tour,” he is clearly comfortable on stage or podium.) Gopnik’s smoothly free and easy delivery makes it all seem simple and off-the-cuff, belying the likelihood that every sentence was meticulously sculpted.
Yes, Gopnik strives to concentrate on discussing New York as seen through his perceptive eyes. But he strays, again and again, at one point winding up in Venice. (His longtime Upper East Side analyst unaccountably decrees that “you will order the linguine alle vongole, and then you will be happy.”) As it happens, on the very night when Adam Gopnik’s New York closes, I myself will be sitting in an osteria in Dorsoduro, inevitably digging into a plate of linguine alla vongole. Happy, I suppose—Venice and vongole will do that to you—but I don’t imagine it will be quite as nourishing as spending 70 minutes at Lincoln Center with Adam Gopnik in Adam Gopnik’s New York.
Adam Gopnik’s New York opened Oct. 17, 2025, at the Clark Studio Theatre and runs through Oct. 26. Tickets and information: lincolncenter.org
