Recommended by Hallie Palladino

This charming one act is a fresh take on the high school romance between smart girl and the trying too hard player guy. As Kate and Kurt work on a project about gender roles and societal expectations in "Taming of the Shrew" they also have to learn to look beyond the labels they've put on each other in order to truly connect.

When a mother blames her daughter for something that isn't the daughter's fault the fallout can result in some serious intergenerational trauma. Quinn dives into this uncomfortable subject by giving us a window into the emotional upheaval surrounding new motherhood leaving us with no easy answers. There are some great roles for women in this all female cast play and some gentle humor to offset the heavy subject matter.

I just saw the Prop Thtr reading of a revamped version of this play complete with original music. It's a slow burn character driven piece about chosen family that explores what makes a community and asks what does safety mean? Can emotional safety and physical safety sometimes be at odds? It's a little remencient of "Balm and Gilead" in that it's an empathetic look into the emotional lives of people living on the margins. This would be great for colleges especially because of all the roles for young people.

I got a sneak peak at a first draft of Locked In. This play will blow the lid off everything you thought you knew about organ donation, the threshold between life and death, and the grey area in between. A heavily theatrical and unapologetically disquieting play about medical ethics that asks vital and challenging questions about the mysterious trinity of brain/body/soul that combine to make us who we are.

I attended the first public reading of Two Quick Shots at the Jackalope Frontier. This play wrestles with questions about addiction, depression, despair and the problem of suffering. As characters in this play try various strategies to escape their suffering, from drugs to running away to avoidance to denial, to contemplating suicide, they are confronted with the fact sometimes the only way to get around pain is to go through it. This play is also loaded with complex moral questions about who has the right to take a life (human or pet).

What is the life cycle of a storefront theater company? How do artists and collaborators become family, and what do they owe each other as they forge ahead in the brutally competitive environment of this collaborative art form? What does success in theater actually look like and how can artists sustain it? The paradox between the fact that artists need one another to create work and gain recognition, but then often must leave one another to grow their careers is the very serious theme of this hilarious send-up of an evening at the non-equity theater Jeff awards.

I just saw the first preview of the Teatro Vista production of this play. It's a perfect companion to The Madres. It's urgently important storytelling. It's hard to reduce this deeply moving play to a brief description. But I will say it shows a woman in an impossible situation navigating her identity and figuring out what it means to be a daughter, mother, wife and artist. This play is relevant to this cultural moment for dozens of reasons.

I just saw the Broken Nose production in Chicago. It has simple, elegant storytelling, strong characters and it's exciting, engaging, funny and surprising. Spotswood does a beautiful job of connecting the process of training to be a fighter with the ongoing process of figuring out how to self-advocate in real life. He also shows characters who are fighting to get better, feel better and take better care of one another. This is a hopeful and thoughtfully written play.

I just saw the world premiere of Missed Opportunities in Chicago, directed by Lexi Saunders, and loved Jillian's smart, faced paced dialogue and her incredibly charming characters. This play is funny, smart and heartwarming and it avoids the pitfalls of many romantic comedies in the best of ways. It's an antidote to played out tropes of the genre and it gives each character not just sharp wit but emotional complexity.

Mays cleverly skewers educated suburban white teachers who are irrationally attached to the notion of a "traditional" (ie white) Santa after a student asserts Santa is black (a factually sound statement since Santa is the parents, and parents come in every color). This play is a clever and biting send-up of the entrenched anti-blackness upheld by our educational system, a system which erases the lived experiences of children of color, punishing and silencing them. With a brilliantly funny face off between a black and white Santa each claiming to be "real " Mays exposes the weaponization of American cultural myths.