Recommended by Christine Evans

Exuberant, apocalyptic, heart-tugging, funny, tragic and wildly imaginative. A Liz Duffy Adams play is always a complete, compelling world unto itself, but one in which human folly and brilliance are always recognizable.

The Gulf is an elegant, stripped-down, powerful play. I loved the poetics of the title and setting--"the gulf" as physical and emotional landscape. The characters are engaging, funny, heartbreaking and believable. There's a Southern rhythm and poetry, and undertone of elegy, that infuses the play, and it builds to a tremendous intensity. It also puts poor, gay women on stage in full complex individuality, rather than as identity tokens. Beautiful work that should be seen all over the country (and the world).

I just love this play. Droll, brilliant, and just about as strange as its subject--home life after warfare (or is that the war at home?) It's one of those plays that expanded my vision of theatre. Weird, wired, with brilliant language and profound ideas honed into a deceptively light, blackly comic surface.

A play with a talking rat, the Bronx burning--and hip-hop! Ruthless real-estate profiteering stalks in the background, pushing a young black man to make a dangerous choice. I loved the nuanced characters, the vivid sense of a time and place, and the fierce fire at the heart of this play. Wry, funny, tragic, and scalpel-sharp in its dissection of the ties that bind--both family and community. A gorgeous play.