Recommended by John Minigan

Tin Man feels real, and because of that, it's heart-breaking. At the side of injured high school football player Dean's hospital bed, Max and Dean begin with banter that gradually reveals pain that's more than physical, and that almost helps to create a connection between them that could get past the too-common male silence about sorrow, loss, relationships. The play paints a vivid, accurate, and painful picture of how "padded" teen boys are on and off the football field, how hard it is to achieve honest, vulnerable communication, and how male silence about emotion passes from generation to generation.

This is a gorgeous, haunting play that grabs you from the first lines of dialogue and pulls you deeper, scene by scene, into its spell. By the time it's worked through its twists and horrors and brought its characters to a conclusion that feels inescapable, it's achieved a kind of mythic energy and language and risen to the level of the classic American folk-tales. Stunning, poetic language and a compellingly dangerous relationship between its two characters.

It was such a treat to read this script and then see the show on its feet at Shakespeare & Company. Carey Crim creates such sharp, wise, funny characters that you can't help but fall in love with them right away--and then she brings you deep into their lives, their loves, their griefs, their struggles to find hope, and ultimately their "grace." It's rare to get to know characters so well, inside and out! So much fun, and so richly crafted and deeply felt.

Like the best science fiction, Repossessed creates a world with an inner consistency and logic and with important things to say about our own—in this case about consciousness, memory, and how much we’re willing to sacrifice to get what we want.
And the concerns of the characters (are experiences/emotional connections meaningful if they are “virtual”?) are compelling and frighteningly contemporary.
The structure of the play is, even as a reader, mesmerizing, moving from scenes to interludes that gives us glimpses below the surface of the characters and back in a fascinating and compelling way. Stunning, rich work.

This is a hilarious, constantly surprising, wish-it-could-really-happen romp through a world of millennials, aging hippies, an old prison friend of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, and Jeff Sessions himself. The one liners are sharp and strong, and the underlying premise is subversive and glorious.

This is a powerful, clear, disturbing trip through multiple levels of truth and lies. Set in the campaign office of a Trump-like presidential candidate, the play quickly blows apart the difference between truth and the convenient lies we believe, and then goes deeper, looking at issues of race, conservatism, liberalism, media--and deconstructing the meaning of truth in each area it approaches. The play is relentless, totally compelling, and important for its unflinching look at how we seem to have decided that a lie is almost always better than the truth.

A gorgeous, complex and profoundly moving piece about the ways we try to know one another, try to understand and respond to love, and try to reconcile the ways losses from the past affect the present and the future. The play weaves the stories of several generations in two families, shifting poetically across timelines and locations, with surprising resonances among the generations. At times harrowing, at times magical, but always focused on true human moments.

This is a tightly structured, crystal-clear, hilarious take on the terror expectant parents feel, crafted with a very fine-tuned journey for the parents-to-be. As with other great comedy, its jokes are its truths. And the unexpected ending? A brilliant shift of context.

Directive 47 takes on increasingly complex and compelling questions of 'doctrine' versus 'belief,' confronting questions of how we reconcile things we believe to be true with what outside arbiters of truth tell us. Along the journey, Sisters Barbara, Elizabeth, and Catherine--and even the most seemingly rigid character, Bishop Williams--struggle in deep and revealing ways with not only their duties to an abstract faith when it conflicts with the very real challenges of those around them, but also with their relationships with one another and their own senses of self. A thought-provoking and fully engaging play.

This is a lovely, quiet and sensitive piece. We experience the deeply intertwined lives of a middle-aged man and a young woman whose connection in the past was life-changing, but whose growing connection over the several weeks of the play may be even more life-changing for both. Beautifully imagined picture of how the tragedies in life can bring us to new connections and understandings of "self" and of "other."