Emmy-nominated producer Kate Barry brings her autobiographical solo show Kate, Allie and the ’86 Mets to Asylum NYC for six days, November 5–10, 2026, following a 23-performance run at the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
The show runs at Asylum NYC, 123 East 24th Street, with performances at 7 p.m. and an added 2 p.m. matinee on Saturday, November 7. It lasts about 60 minutes. Every performance is followed by an audience Q&A with guests and a reception in the venue’s bar.
The story is Barry’s own. In 1986, the year of the Mets’ World Series and of the CBS sitcom Kate & Allie, two newly divorced Long Island mothers, Grace and Dorothy, combined their households and moved with their four children into one house in Setauket. Everyone took it for a practical arrangement. Decades later Barry, the eldest daughter, learned that the two women had been in love the whole time.
Barry tells it alone on stage, with family photographs, home video and 1980s music. For New York she is enlarging the screen side of the show, using what the Asylum NYC room can do visually to add archival footage and documentary-style material. One prop has a history of its own: a 1999 Newsday article, “Sharing a Solution,” that reported on the family’s shared house.
Alex Kagy directs the New York engagement. He is a New York-based writer, director, performer and teacher who directed three Mainstage Revues for Boston’s Improv Asylum. Editing and sound design are by Krystalline Armendariz, prop design by Amber Unkle, and poster design by Matthew Brunson-Cline and Ashley Thomas. Dan Barry, Liza Borghesani and Katie Boren are co-producers.
The piece premiered to a sold-out audience at a New York storytelling festival in 2024, then played Dublin’s Comedy Cellar before its Fringe run at the Gilded Balloon. The Edinburgh Evening News gave it four stars and called it “a heartwarming tale of two families living under one roof”; Fringe Review wrote that “the emotional pitch is perfect.”
Barry has worked in film and television for nearly three decades, producing for Netflix, HBO, Amazon, Apple TV+, Disney+, Hulu and National Geographic. A former Head of Current at Story Syndicate, she has credits including I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Take Care of Maya, Gone Girls, Sally, Enigma and Titan. She is also developing a feature film version, Just Like Kate and Allie, which has been invited to Stowe Story Labs.
Anyone who cannot attend can buy a donation ticket, which gives a seat to a local LGBTQ+ community member or a partner arts organization, with the proceeds supporting the production. Tickets are on sale through Asylum NYC.
