Recommended by Ian Thal

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.

In this science-fiction satire, McGregor imagines a not-so-implausible future about an AI-dominated economy, and then figures out the absurd extremes that his all-too-human characters use in order to game the system, and of course, prove that they are not robots!

What makes this horror story so effective is how well grounded it is in naturalistic drama of human emotions, relationships, and life-changing moments -- that Blevins leaves it ambiguous whether we are witnessing a purely psychological horror or that something supernatural is at work is skillfully unsettling.

Lynch's retelling of "Cinderella" stands out from most adaptations by placing less emphasis on pursuing princes, and more on family reconciliation, the processing of grief, even presenting the step-mother with sympathy.