How To Be A Rock Critic, a new play based on the life and writings of legendary music journalist Lester Bangs, will come to New York’s Public Theater January 5–15 as part of the 14th annual Under the Radar Festival.

The play, created by award-winning playwrights Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, is a one-man show featuring Jensen as the Bangs, an enigmatic rock critic who built a iconic career of honest music writing and interviews throughout the 1970s and died of a drug overdose in 1982.

“Lester Bangs was a critic and a superfan; a utopian and a cynic; a rebel and an idealist; and one of the greatest writers of the 20th century,” Jensen says in a press release. “The world knows him as the co-inventor of the word ‘punk’ and a groundbreaking music critic, but Lester wasn’t just a rock writer, he was a ruthlessly honest, endlessly restless moral philosopher who spent his too-short life searching in music for connection, transcendence, and truth.”

More information on the show and tickets to the performances can be found here.