Recommended by Ian Thal

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

An absurdist midrashic tragicomedy about the execution of two minor characters in one of two books of the Bible in which God is not mentioned is a whole other Megillah! What choice do they have in becoming plot device in a text read every year on Purim? What happens when they realize that their ends have already been inscribed? Richardson gives Bigtan and Teresh backstories that connect them to better known characters as Mordechai, Vashti, and Esther, and historical events.

Un Hombre is a magical realist exploration of grief steeped in Jewish tradition: Though it is comic to imagine a sculptress accidentally creating a golem and assigning him to tutor her son in both Spanish and Hebrew as he prepares for his Bar Mitzvah, Kaplan gives it gravitas expanding it into a philosophical meditation on existence, purpose, being part of a family still in mourning. The climax comes when Josh gives a D'Var Torah that addressing both the troubling aspects of his assigned reading and what has happened over the course of the play.