Recommended by Jean Egdorf

As a once-teen who had a trying relationship with my mom, relied on the friendships I formed in my found-community in the early days of the internet, and who went through my own "serial killer phase," this play hits something personal. Katherine shines in her creation of dynamic, authentic young characters and her ability to toe the line between comedy and hard-hitting realities in each moment. The beautiful heart of this play is in the relationship between a mother and daughter, and how trust and love are built and challenged in a dangerous modern world.

I had the incredible honor to see a workshop production of this play at Ohio University, and was familiar with the play through workshop readings before. Inna's language is powerful on its own, but in production, this play is elevated to a whole other level. It is gripping, brutal, and heart wrenching, but still at times Inna -- not unlike Chekhov, whose play The Seagull is masterfully evoked throughout -- finds moments of love, beauty, and humor even in the darkest situation.

I had the incredible pleasure of seeing a staged reading of To Saints and Stars recently. I do not cry easily, especially in public. The relationship between two best friends, separated by unbearable distance, is brought to life with such great honesty and heart, by the end of the play I had tears streaming down my face. This play centers two women in professions we don't often have the fortune to see onstage, and is a beautiful, poetic, raw, and vastly smart exploration of science and faith.

It is remarkably refreshing to see a relationship between a middle-aged, married couple built in adoration and commitment, with a healthy sex-life to boot. Skye has a masterful voice which is used to great effect to create honest, open, flawed, and engaging characters. The love, patience, and devotion that's built between these characters (and which so effortlessly fills in the world and history that exists before Scene 1) makes the conflict they face together all the more heart-wrenching.

There is so much to love about this play: an honest and complicated yet deeply compassionate story about an adopted son and his mother; a masterful use of a natural parent-child vernacular and Mateo's own poetic beat woven throughout the text; and a cross-country road trip that brings the audience both into the awkward confines of a car with your parent and out into a greater world that transcends the one we understand as lines on a map. Themes of identity, culture, how to move forward, family, and love make this play deeply personal and unequivocally universal.

A true mark of a strongly composed one-act play is if it can exist as a fulfilling night of theatre all on its own; while I haven't yet paid an admission price to see this play, I'd happily do it in full, a dozen times over, just to sit under the eponymous skylight in the run-down club with the two characters Brayden's given voice to. Falling Skies is a beautiful, humorous, heart wrenching story of shared grief and finding grace in forgiveness.