Recommended by Shaun Leisher

Having directed many shows, I know how absolutely torturous the process can be and I think Hickey captures that well by telling this story in real-time and having us hear the same scenes over and over and over. Keeping us off guard about what is real and what's not creates the necessary tension that leads to the fiery ending. You think you know where this play is going but you have no idea. In the end, we might not have the most satisfying conclusion but it unfortunately feels like the most real one.

A visceral play that engages all the senses and leapt off the page from the very start. The specificity of the culture in things like medicine and music made this all the more engaging. These characters are so well-written and are going to be ones Latinx performers are going to be dying to take time. The way is time is completely bent and fucked with in this play was thrilling. I was very onboard for the unrealistic logic but then I was blown away when I saw how it all made sense at the very end. PRODUCE THIS PLAY!!!

I love plays about people making plays!! Needless to say, I love this play!!! It finds a way to connect this ancient play to the lives of young people without being too heavy handed or treating the audience like idiots. It trusts that Shakespeare's words will speak for themself and we will see the relevance along with these students. A play about being doing awful things without turning them into 2-dimensional villains. People that make choices that cause deep harm while also being a product of a fucked system.

They can do all the non-traditional casting they want but at the end of the day the white supremacist specter of William Shakespeare hangs over every line of his plays. Why are we trying to "fix" these plays when we should be instead be making room for new writers today that are mining their lived experiences to wrestle with these plays? This is a play about Shakespeare and the way the white run media tries to control how Black bodies are portrayed but it's also a gripping play about friends turned collaborators.

This is a play needs to be read by every artistic director of a Shakespeare festival or theatre company that focuses on the classics. The rare play that both successfully honors the play it's adapted from and completely subverts it. Who would have thought that Lear would so easily serve as a lens to explore trans identity? This play highlights so many different marginalized communities in extremely nuanced ways. The poetic dialogue in this play is absolutely delicious and will be a delight to deliver for any actor.

This play absolutely defies categorization. It's a father/daughter play. It has puppets. There's actual bike riding. It's wild and I loved every second. It uses tropes of memory plays that are as old as Tennessee Williams (I'm sure older than him but I'm too lazy to research) but throws them on their heads with the use of experimental theatre methods. There's one moment in this play where Franny asks her father about the way he reacted to something that happened in her childhood that will probably never leave me.

Maintaining relationships with your childhood friends is already hard without the struggles that come up with camping. I loved how Walborn layers on the stakes. I loved how danger like the mysterious noises and wrecked campsite are introduced but never really resolved. It's a classic misdirection that lets us know that the true danger can be found in the human drama elements of this play. It doesn't always make sense why these women were ever friends to begin with but deep friendship doesn't always have to make sense.

Plays about the gun epidemic are nothing new and I wish I could say that they are successful at inspiring meaningful change around the issue. This play is different though and I think its uniqueness could spark some effective dialogue. I love me some meta-theatre and the way this play is able to tackle the new play development process and gun violence is absolutely brilliant. Plus it's a queer love story!! What can't Kara Hadden do?!?!?! The writing is biting and thrilling and I hope to see this produced one day.

Having gone to a college that was named the #1 party school in America my senior year (not in small part due to its large Greek life), I am hungry for plays that explore fraternity culture and this one does it so well. I think it's unique structure is so effective in both a storytelling sense but also as a way to look at the absurdity of the rush process. These characters are so interesting on their own but I think it's the moments where the act as an ensemble that got me super excited. Also, these monologues are killer.

Alaniz has a gift for dialogue that is so poetic but not completely unnatural. True this play takes creative liberties with naturalism but it still works so well as a human story. A story of two women that just want to be good at their jobs while dealing with unimaginable pain. I really appreciated that I didn't seen their individual pains coming at all and they weren't used to shock the audience. So many are clocking in and out everyday, struggling with so much hard shit and praying that their employers don't notice.