Recommended by Paul Donnelly

Equal parts engrossing and unsettling (in the best possible way), this play offers a deliberately incomplete portrait of a single day of national horror and all the dreadful days that followed. It is mercifully non prescriptive and the richer for the gaps and inconsistencies that the viewer must try to fill and decipher. It even manages the feat of humanizing a bigot without justifying or rationalizing her bigotry. All in all a surprisingly complex, nearly sprawling work presented in a spare, tight frame.

Lovely, just lovely. A perfect snapshot of mature love responding to an extraordinary circumstance. NIcely structured and punctuated with well-observed humor.

Watching Nicole overplay her hand in this tart, honest two-hander brought to mind Lena Horne's description of Pal Joey as someone who "ain't always quite as slick as he's s'posed to be." She's got her money and she's got her attitude and she's as alone at the ending as she was at the start, but her time with Steph had clearly disrupted her complacency about many aspects of her life.

This extraordinary play offers an exploration of many kinds of hunger - spiritual, emotional, sexual, and literal - that manages to be both astringent and lyrical. The hurtling narrative grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go. Each character is rich, compelling, and precisely drawn. The play's more fantastic elements, which feel deeply earned and are quite breathtaking, lead to an unexpected and deeply satisfying conclusion.

The simplicity and clarity of the exchanges between Roger and Beth makes their loss all the more shattering. This play gets at the truth of how people endure the unendurable and how sometimes they just don't for a time. Zubel offers an extraordinarily humane portrait of life in the midst of harrowing grief.

A witty parody of the Robert Wilson/Philip Glass collaboration (which I admit to only knowing from criticism and snippets on YouTube) that also gets at some of the strengths of the Wilson/Glass reliance on images as the central narrative device. There is also real poignancy in Hamlet's recollection of the burial and retrieval of toy cars despite the absurdity of the premise. There are many levels of meaning contained in these three brief pages.

Charlene's dilemma is appallingly familiar, but her mechanisms for addressing it are refreshingly original and direct. While there is much that is very funny in this short piece, our laughter has to be rueful as the workplace prejudices and consequences at its core seem to remain intractable.

I came to Skin and Bone after finishing The Arsonists hungry for more by Jacqueline Goldfinger and was not disappointed. Skin and Bone has a different tone, more overtly comic and macabre, with a suspenseful story line and an ending that I did not see coming. Although I do have to say that I would root for two aging cannibals over Walmart any day!

The Arsonists offers vigorous, vital and wholly compelling storytelling, both by the characters and in the central narrative. M. faces the excruciatingly difficult task of letting go and there is real suspense in watching her reluctantly make the choices and take the actions that allow her to finally do so. There were so many moments in which I was shaken in a way that "moved" doesn't quite capture by scenes of harrowing emotional resonance enacted with clarity or described with elegant simplicity.

Mrs. Harrison is an extraordinarily compelling two-hander about the construction and ownership of memory and the impact of race on both life and art. Holly's casual racism and sense of grievance slam hard against Aisha's identity, both the real and constructed parts. The riveting question pulsing under their confrontation is, does one own a story for having experienced it or must one also truly understand it? This is a piece that should be produced widely for its skill as well as for the issues it raises.