Recommended by Conor McShane

A frequently heartbreaking, sensitively handled piece that tackles a difficult subject with humor and imagination. I loved the use of theatricality to convey the slippery nature of memory among dementia patients, and the ways that time and space blur together in the "eternal present."

As someone who always enjoys poorly translated text, this play is in my sweet spot. Levine nails the wonky syntax and overly literal definitions that give it that "copied and pasted into Google Translate" kind of feel. Very funny!

A deeply unsettling play that burrows its way into your brain and plants roots. The eerie sense of remove serves to make the characters' treatment towards their slaves, along with the increasingly shocking (offstage) violence, even more disturbing. Their casually dehumanizing language, uttered as naturally as breath, is extremely well-crafted. An extremely effective experience that really sticks with you, even on the page.

The great artistic polymath Gordon Parks gets a stunning "portrait of the artist as a young man" from one of our finest playwrights. A beautiful, moving, inspiring journey.

Gill spins our current economic, political, and climate anxieties into a rippingly funny and disturbingly plausible tale of our ongoing apocalypse. His deft world-building fills out the edges of the story and suggests a whole broken society beyond its pages. I could see this as an ongoing series exploring more corners of this drowned world!

With this play, Nick Malakhow gives us an appropriately thorny, multifaceted conflict to reflect on institutionalized racism, the ways in which even well-meaning liberal minded people can inadvertently uphold racist power structures, and the struggles of people of color to challenge these structures without being told they're being "difficult" or creating conflict. His facility with language and crafting well-rounded, engaging characters makes the piece feel real and extremely vital.

A terrific sci-fi parable that sheds a chilling light on the disenfranchisement of people of color in America, from slavery to sharecropping to mass incarceration and beyond. The "solution" of HYDRA may seem like freedom, but the play reminds us that the illusion of freedom is no freedom at all.

A surreal, fantastical, ultimately very moving journey through a world of economic anxiety, small cash deals, and predatory birds. Parker's struggle with his illness, along with his unlikely friendship with Callan, anchor the story and render it beautifully human. Really terrific stuff.

A fun sci-fi-oriented piece that gets into some big questions like whether humanity can or even should be in charge of its own destiny, and indeed the things that make us human in the first place. The play strikes an intriguing, somewhat detached tone, the reason for which becomes clear as it goes along. Thought provoking stuff!

A beautiful retelling of the Greek legend of Agamemnon transposed to the War on Drugs-era, a different kind of history story whose effects are still felt today. The play conflates history and legend, realism and lyricism, to moving, heartbreaking effect.