Recommended by Ian Thal

A hilarious dark comedy perfect for a Halloween program. Did these weird sisters just forget to purchase everything on their Halloween shopping list this year? Or are they engaging in their annual private joke, that the audience is just lucky to eavesdrop on? Or is it possible that they really are they a death cult of two?

Anyone who has grown up with rumors and reports of poisoned treats during spooky season will have a nervous laugh.

A fun satire of the culture clash that happens when a community theater whose members have been together for decades discuss bringing their inclusive play submission guidelines up to the standards of 21st century best practices.

J. Lois Diamond's ALICIA isn't just a biographical tale of acclaimed ballet dancer Alicia Alonso's overcoming her loss of eyesight, but an epic setting her career against changing dance pedagogy from authoritarian to empowering, Cold War politics in which cultural exchanges were a form of soft-diplomacy, and how Alonso herself used her close relationship with the Castro regime in Cuba to advance her career on the international stage. A fascinating portrait of an artist and her times.

Fans know that Nora Louise Syran is too imaginative to simply retell the story of Robin Hood, instead, her GOODFELLOW, ROBIN HOOD is a story about how Elinor, a young woman educated in a convent, attempts to assemble the disparate folktales and ballads into a cohesive story, even as she finds parallels in her own life and in the political life of 14th century England wracked by the Peasants' Revolt against Richard II's reign. Great metatheatricality!

Rex McGregor's THE MAMA AND THE PAPA is psychedelic satire about God and Mother Nature meeting in the midst of the 1960s counter-culture fueled by free-love, marijuana, LSD, and the Beatles, but it's also a debate about reproductive choice, the environment and pharmaceuticals!

Rachel Feeny-Williams has reimagined the stories of Neverland and its inhabitants as a crime noir, with the Peter Pan creator, J.M. Barry/Barrie as a hard-boiled private detective trying to find truth and justice in a corrupt city where the line between law and organized crime is blurred. The dialogue is sharp; The crime story is compelling; and the way Feeny-Williams reinvents characters and concepts for an entirely new genre is inventive and entertaining.

Rex McGregor has crafted an eccentric force of nature in the character of Shan, a cosplaying speaker in aphorisms, and social media-savvy scholar of China's Mongol era, and set her loose at a college graduation party, creating academic careers, breaking hearts, and conquering with the sword of ambition!

Whether one is an entrepreneurial sex-worker, or the spouse of an artist about to have a gallery opening, everyone eventually has to do the laundry, and sometimes those people cross paths at a neighborhood laundromat. A conversation about pleasure, desire, economics unfold, as a parade of costumes, paraphernalia, and toys change hands.

A great mix of verbal and prop-based comedy.

A freak disaster at sea and a rescue by a luxury cruise ship starts as a comedy of manners and quickly escalates into a grotesque satire of class, the hospitality industry, and maritime law.

A parodic origin story of the popular actors' superstition about the "Scottish Play". Latham's dialogue is a mash-up of iambic pentameter, 20th and 21st century slang, and excerpts from The Tragedy of Macbeth. The result is smart and wickedly hilarious.