Recommended by Nick Malakhow

Beautiful, lyrical, and spare--this piece tackles mortality, dying, coping with terminal illness, and coming of age in a direct way. It treats its young characters (and young folks in the audience) like complex and intelligent human beings, and would appeal to younger and older audiences alike. Hageman's text is poetic yet accessible (and includes a couple of well-timed and welcome laugh moments), and she provides a beautiful blueprint that creative production teams can take in any number of varied directions. Wonderfully executed!

Wow! Beautiful, funny, heartbreaking work that bends genre/reality while still being immensely human. Rowland explores grief, relationships, and emotional self-sabotage with two nuanced, complex central characters. I was most amazed at the tightrope walk between hilarity and tragedy that this play navigated throughout. The surprising yet seamless transitions, dreamlike moments, and at times heightened text and world also felt supremely theatrical--the bold stage pictures stuck with me and made me yearn to see this on its feet in the hands of a creative director and design team. A wonderful challenge for artists on and offstage alike.

Beautifully written and structured solo show that makes excellent use of the form. Rosenblatt's piece feels both deeply personal, intimate, and specific, while also being extremely relatable and universal in how it zooms out to articulate others' experiences. OCD is explored here in such a way that makes it accessible to folks unfamiliar with the disorder while simultaneously providing nuanced and essential representation that is reaffirming for those who are living with it, as well as for anyone who has been stigmatized for their mental health issues. Hilarious, fast-paced, poignant, and engaging!

What a mindblowing, theatrical piece that both exists on its own superhuman, heightened plane, while feeling so entirely human at the same time. Darcy Parker Bruce somehow joins fable, folktale, offbeat comedy, punk rock, movement, and horror in a surreal and compelling aesthetic whole. The trauma and the aftermath of sexual abuse and domestic terror is so poignantly captured in the brilliant, potent, and layered extended visual and textual metaphors for Max's transformation. This play would be an amazing showcase for actors, directors, and a design team alike.

Exquisitely-crafted play with regards to characterization, theatricality, and structure! As a theatrical event, the bold and distinctive characters barreled through a raucous and charged Seder at a breakneck pace, punctuated by brilliant tempo shifts. Levitsky-Weitz balanced the irregular rhythms of natural human speech with spare lyrical poetry and bombastic stage images that I won't soon forget. I was amazed at how each character was so distinct in the sizeable ensemble, and the weighty conversations about family, faith, tribalism, Zionism, identities of various kinds, tradition vs. progress, and many other topics were so impeccably executed. Hilarious, dark, electric, magical, awe-inspiring.

With skillful showing vs telling, Mabey addresses weighty issues with a deft hand. I appreciated the honoring of religion and faith here, and the illustration of how LGBTQIA identity may exist within instead of in opposition to Christianity. Both characters are warmly drawn and treat each other with a reaffirming tenderness while still demonstrating potent internal conflict and tension.

A beautiful short piece that makes perfect use of video conferencing platforms for the purpose of thoughtful and poignant theater. In ten short pages, Mabey manages to craft two nuanced characters who live at particular identity sections that are underrepresented in theater with regard to gender identity and ability, and gives them life beyond those identifiers while still acknowledging and honoring those identifiers. A touching and original variation on the "two strangers meeting" concept.

"The Burn" falls into what is rapidly becoming my favorite new sub-genre of play--the "Play in Conversation with 'The Crucible'" genre--because these plays reposition the themes and issues from the Witch Trials to center women in the story rather than that bore, John Proctor! Here, Dawkins astutely focuses on the ways that society pits women against one another in order to distract from the horrors and crimes of the patriarchy and toxic masculinity. "The Burn" theatricalizes the online world in a compelling and super-saturated-but-low-tech manner. One grand gesture of projection/technology is used very effectively and chillingly at the climax.

A tender-hearted play that straddles the line between romantic comedy and politically-aware drama, and that possesses a layer of nuance due to its exploration of social circumstances it arises out of. The conversations about marriage equality and the differing relationships each character has towards it (due to generational difference, politics, personal history, etc.) are complex and well-articulated. Dawkins also writes these characters in hilarious and human fashion, mining humor from their natural interactions rather than contrived jokes. Alongside the humor is a dose of beauty and some subtle magic that centers mostly on David and Benoit's touching interactions. Lovely!

Gorgeous play! I just love this overall sense that we're peeking into a shadow box of humanity in looking at the cross-section of people represented in this piece. I love this both as a standalone play that tackles connection, loneliness, loss, and love in a very contemporary way, and also how it is in conversation with and plays with Shakespeare's source text. I can also see how the use of music as underscoring, as a metaphor for community, and as an amplification of the emotions in the texts will be a sublime feature of the play in production!