Recommended by David Hansen

I feel this. I’m feeling it right now. Thumbs up.

The best dialogue naturally winds it’s way from an impossible first encounter through to a common understanding. This brief piece is a nice reminder of the potential for that understand, when people listen. There’s hope for us all!

This was painful, and true. My infant son was injured under my care (he’s 16 now, I was teaching him to drive tonight) so I felt the devastating pain of the loss at the center of this piece. It’s a devastating but delicate two-hander about regret and the need to carry forward, and I strongly recommend it.

In this short play, this six page monologue, Suilebhan presents a lyric and gentle rumination on the nature of existence, bundled into a small, delicate spheroid. A provocative, promised “demonstration” takes the shape of a sermon, through which the egg represents all things, and no thing. It’s a gorgeous piece of surprising depth, and I highly recommend it.

Alexander’s script takes its inspiration from “the Scottish play” reinterpreting it as a cross-generational Afrofuturist fever dream, in which Top Dollar and Lady Lava aspire to dominance in a poetic fantasy replete with vengeful ghosts, mysterious strangers and sex robots. It's a trip, it's got a funky beat, and I can bug out to it. Highly recommended!

(A) Do we produce a problematic yet popular American musical featuring a diverse cast, which may serve to undermine the worser aspects of the work and provide visibility and advantage to BIPOC these performers or (B) create a new, so-called divised play reflecting Gen Z anxiety and concerns which may not actually be good and no one’s going to want to see but at least it’s not fucking Oklahoma? This play is so funny, even Thomson’s stage directions are hilarious. Highly recommended!

McCasland has created a creation myth, about the original production of "The Glass Menagerie", centered on its ageing star, Laurette Taylor, who originated the role of Amanda Wingfield. It is a story of recovery, poetic in its own fashion, as Taylor presents at AA meetings, her stories of personal struggle rival that of Tom, the narrator of the play she is starring in. Williams plays his part as an alcoholic philosopher who inspired his mother figure into sobriety, for her own sake, but really for his, you know? It's fascinating, hopeful, and I highly recommend it.

The playwright playful anachronrizes the tale, it is then, but also now, with phones and media and humorous, contemporary turns of phrase. But it’s comic relief, which serves to make the tragedy, the drama bearable, not to send it up. The protagonist endures such grief, the absence of her husband, the murder of one child, the dismissive behavior of her other children. It's gorgeous and funny and upsetting and wonderful. Highly recommended!

Max and Diana were united when their parents began sleeping together, and over the next thirty years they manage their folks and themselves, two souls entwined in a need for trust, for having one person that they can entirely count on. And that’s hard. It’s a very touching, soul-bearing work that jumps back and forth in time, from childhood to middle years, and all points in between, creating a tapestry of love and dependence. It’s worth it to have someone.

What is unique is this piece is that it is not a Vietnam era tragedy in which the father is a bellicose, authoritarian bigot or the mother a homophobic shrew. They are accepting, if not immediately, then easily. Their love of their children is more important than societal pressure or their own generational impulses. No, the conflict is between the brothers and their separation. This play is a picture of how this war, which tore apart a nation, failed to tear apart one family, which is an uplifting tale to hear, and I highly recommend it.