Recommended by John Minigan

Cynthia Arsenault's comic satire hits at a truth that's pretty powerful and on-target--that the more plugged in we are to the online world, the weaker the connection we have to the people around us. This play provides the dopamine hits we're used to getting from our internet addictions. Funny and necessary.

A sharp and compelling play built around the story of Tessa, a character who grabs you from the first moment. It's hard to always fully like her as a person--but it's impossible not to end up loving her and sympathizing with her passionate shelter work and her need for love. She has complex relationships with all around her, and most complex is her relationship with her father, and it's a connection that leads to a final moment whose beauty you can only gasp at.

This is a finely wrought piece that manages to capture both the friendship of these two characters in clear detail and the emotional distance between them as one revels in the adventure of a stakeout and one faces her longing, her fear, and her loss. The move from a comic and slightly mysterious opening--what are the stakes in this stakeout?--to a powerful and brave conclusion is clear and compelling. A gorgeous play, with great roles for both performers.

Jonte's characters are fabulously well-drawn--simultaneously not fully likeable and still completely lovable--and the dramatic situation in the play so highly charged, so funny, and so compelling. The Shark Play has repartee worthy of Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant, but an aching heart as wide as the ocean underneath. A lovely, rollicking, and deeply satisfying play. Read it, enjoy it, produce it!

A gorgeous, emotionally complex play about the ways friendship and love can endure despite trauma, differing goals, and separation. The characters, whom we get to know at difficult moments in their lives, are thoroughly compelling. Great dialogue, brilliant use of fluid chronology, and an astonishing passage in which we experience a character coming close to drowning--both literally and metaphorically. Nick Malakhow's play lets us know that friendship and love can pull us out of even the deepest waters.

This is a powerful, human memorial to Punjab Singh. Diamond anchors the horrors of violence in the familiar and uses the power of smell and the knowledge that our eyes fill with tears to make our moments with this character personal and deeply resonant.

McLindon's brilliant craft in When We Get Good Again pulls you in with wit and sharp characterizations and, before you've quite realized it, you're in a complex and compelling world of moral questions. Are we what we do or who we say we are (or will be)? What is the nature of loyalty? Is gaming a system (in hockey or academics) justified when the system itself plays games? Thoroughly engaging, clear, and thoroughly entertaining.

A little gem of a play--funny, unique, and touching. This play's couple (a playwright with an unusual concept for a short play) and his partner (an artistic director with grave doubts about the playwright's concept) work through conflict toward a positive resolution. Like the "lamp" in the playwright's play, the artistic director has to give up preconceptions of what it means to be "bright" to make the relationship and the play work. Wonderful and unexpected parallels in the worlds of the play and the play-within-the-play, and great comic potential for two silent stagehands. I'd love to see this on stage!

Devastating and powerful and not so much science fiction as a warning about how close the edge we are, and how destructive of science and the environment our autocratic government has already become. The roles are compelling and, like the structure, complex and rewarding. An important play.

A play that is as stunning, surprising, and funny as it is rich and deeply affecting. A heart-breaking and affirming exploration of how the pain we suffer shapes us, holds us back, and can maybe move us forward. Audrey Cefaly uses time, space, language, time (and goats) in ways that force you to rethink how story and structure work. And the deep need for art is woven into this play's fabric. Gorgeous work.