Recommended by Ian Thal

  • The Ticket
    17 Jul. 2023
    A brilliantly paced comedy about the friendships and antagonisms that form in the customer service industry, the economics of the lottery, an outsourced side-hustle gone awry, and the very fuzzy costume between pop-culture and prurient interest
  • Recess
    17 Jul. 2023
    Georgina insists that playing house will help her and Lucas prepare for adulthood, but it is also a way for Lucas to work through his feelings of less than perfect role-models and imagine a better future. Krantz' poetic sense captures the imagination of childhood as Georgina and Lucas imagine what colors to paint their rooms and appliances and what their dinners will taste like, as their adult selves reflect on what that play meant to them.
  • Wheel of Fortune Reversed
    14 Jul. 2023
    Michael plays a series of games with Death, not in the hopes of cheating her, but to linger just a little longer in the liminal space between one state of being and another and another and to plumb just a few more mysteries.

    Death, with some amusement and compassion for this mortal indulges him for just a few more minutes in a sly tale of love and acceptance. Sickles' playful writing is clever like Michael and compassionate like Death.
  • Lenora
    12 Jul. 2023
    A beautiful and haunting fantasy about dreams, fears, and grief. I heard the audio presentation on the Gather by the Ghostlight podcast and would love to see how an imaginative company would present it live on stage.
  • Playing With Dolls
    27 Jun. 2023
    An awkward back alley exchange between two fathers each trying to get the doll that would make their child happy, leads to an awkward conversation between two adult men who have too few friends in their lives, and likely would have never spoken to one another under any other circumstance. This play explores all the emotional and social obstacles that make it hard for men of a certain age to initiate new friendships

    (Heard on Gather by the Ghostlight podcast.)
  • VIENNA VIENNA VIENNA
    21 Jun. 2023
    An elegantly dark satire in which elderly Jewish literary critic is invited to return to the Austria from which her family fled when she was a child to receive an award and have her citizenship restored, bringing her daughter and granddaughter in tow to share in the honors. Vienna's high culture, baroque architecture, and rich chocolate charm and seduce, but they are reminded that this is a city that welcomed the Nazis, and that their hosts are descendants of those who once profited from the Holocaust.
  • Seeing Maya
    17 Apr. 2023
    A romantic comedy set against the First Gulf War when Iraqi forces launched 42 Scud missiles at the Israeli cities, including Tel Aviv where a successful designer meets a young American half her age. Chaos ensues as both families meet for a Passover seder and every character simultaneously has their own shocking revelation!
  • The Death of Gingerbread
    24 Mar. 2023
    Sylvia's evasiveness about the disappearance of Gingerbread starts off as a farce but quickly delves into darker emotions of guilt, grief, depression, and trauma while maintaining its rapid-fire comic beat.
  • The True Chronicles of Ben-Zion Palachi, the Rabbi Pirate
    17 Mar. 2023
    A fascinatingly constructed adventure told through nested stories. Set against the refugee crisis created by forced conversions, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Spanish Expulsion of 1492, Ben-Zion Palachi has become a pirate captain, the only profession that allows him to remain the protagonist in his own story. But just as conversions, displacement, and secrets place identities into a state of flux, his story is in as much flux as his crew's fortunes.
  • Plague Play
    11 Mar. 2023
    Proctor's "Plague Play" is once hilarious absurdist comedy, animal-themed magic show, and body horror; taken from the most troubling sequence from the Exodus story. The poetic and profane coexist as plagues emerge from Aaron's body, and Moses sees those with whom he grew up die one after another. At the same time, Aaron and Miriam find themselves bonding with their long lost younger brother Moses and his wife Tzipporah.

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