Lucretia Anne Flammang

I organized a reading of excerpts of “The Book of a Universe Inside of a Universe,” and even in a shortened form, the play impressed me with its ambition and scope. Covering three generations, two wars, and half the globe, in its lyricism and inventive staging, the play calls to mind Wilder’s "Skin of Our Teeth" and Kushner’s "Angels in America." The sly humor of a tomato sandwich does not diminish "Universe's" emotional wallop, a story about love and one man’s search for his lost father.

How does loyalty fare when monarchs exercise their power? David Beardsley explores the question in “Holy and Unruly,” his thought-provoking speculation about what transpired when the Irish pirate Grace O’Malley met England’s Queen Elizabeth I. Eschewing straightforward history, Beardsley employs wonderful stagecraft, especially in characters who embody Elizabeth’s regrets. Like a Greek chorus only the Queen and audience see, these characters comment on the action in mime and dance. At times humorous and unexpectedly violent, the play resolves in a confrontation where the Queen and Pirate choose loyalty to each other and rewrite the script on power.

In “Girl with a Gun,” Suzanne Willett places Army women in an impossible moral situation and drives the action to its inevitable, troubling conclusion. Set in Iraq, the play follows a Female Engagement Team as they prepare for and execute a mission “outside the wire.” Under pressure from a previous mission when both their commander and an Iraqi boy were killed, the FET struggles with the ramifications of encountering and using lethal force. In this important play, Willett lays claim to a genre long about men and contributes a compelling drama about women with guns.

In “Concordance,” John Minigan displays his love of language, story, and theater as an empty space humming with possibilities. Five actors portray 22 characters to convey 38 years in the life of Alexander Cruden, compiler of a Biblical concordance. Minigan structures the play in a series of visions that flow like fragments of a mad man’s memory. Cruden was not merely insane, though; he was the victim of injustices practiced against the poor. By turns wildly funny and heartbreaking, “Concordance” is a masterful play about one man’s faith in love, God, and the power of promises.

Send in the bears! In this surprising play, bears of all kinds help an artist determine what sacrifices she should make to save her foundering marriage. Neither wholly surrealistic nor realistic, “The Great Teddy Bear Shipwreck Mystery” unfolds in the literary space of the “fantastic,” where the audience cannot discern the real from the unreal. In this unstable place, shipwrecks occur, love is lost, and an artist is born. Ever-daring, Emily Zemba explores the mysteries of marriage and family through one fantastic journey, over seas and into woods, but never truly leaves home.