Recommended by Nick Malakhow

This intimate piece would be an excellent showcase for two strong actors! I appreciated the specificity of this relationship. The play tells a nuanced story of coming to terms with identity, wanting to connect and love, wanting to be seen, and searching for one's place within a movement. It does all of this with a keen eye to the evolving socio-cultural backdrop of Stonewall to the present. I enjoyed the intriguing nuance of the two men discussing how they fit in the movement and trying to negotiate an evolving relationship to bystandership and upstandership.

An amazing, briskly-moving read! There are necessary conversations and vital issues explored here that I haven't seen tackled theatrically. Craig-Galvan deftly examines the stasis and despair black people face as they try to navigate a world filled with persistent and structurally entrenched racism and hatred, and an unspoken expectation that black activists must do the work of liberating themselves in the absence of white folks willing to try and dismantle these systems on a large scale themselves. She specifically zeroes in on the cultural and individual traumas of black women in an extraordinarily complex, nuanced fashion. Must be produced!

A beautifully rendered and highly theatrical play! I love the way Matthews weaves back and forth through time during the story, and I'm excited about the way the more expressionistic/fabulistic parts of the story could be executed with design elements. Each character is extremely well-defined and nuanced, and the conversations about identity, family (defined in many ways), and trauma are thorough, upfront, and done with care and an economy of words. This piece definitely begs to be on its feet, and I'd love to see what a production team would do with it!

Exquisitely beautiful, funny, lyrical, and tragic by turns. Every unique device of this supremely theatrical play--the laugh light, use of repetition, playing with language and code switching--feels so meticulously structured. It at once feels heightened/mythical/allegorical, and of course all too true to life. Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm comprehensively explores the performative aspects of identity, white supremacy and violence, and feelings of liminality in multiple worlds with boldness and nuance. This piece resonated and captured so much that I struggle to communicate myself. I both felt seen and that it is essential reading for white audiences and theatremakers.

A gorgeous mosaic of a play that gives vividly-realized life to an amazing ensemble of women. I loved the irregular rhythm of this piece, especially the contrast of the first and second halves. Some scenes came and went in strobe-light fashion, while other loaded exchanges lingered. Similarly, the cross-section of joy, violence, pain, and healing provided key insights into both the characters' individual stories as well as reflected the larger themes of the piece--notably women's battles to live and thrive in male-dominated fields, and the victories, compromises, and tragedies of those narratives. Watch the Fresh Ink online reading!

A lovely, theatrical, humorous, and poignant piece! Oglesby has written a sizeable ensemble of fantastic roles for teens with characters that are intersectionally rich in many potential ways including gender, sexual orientation, neuro-diversity, and race. The characters both live and breathe in the heightened world of this text while inhabiting very real and nuanced insecurities, fears, passions, curiosities, and strengths of adolescents. Joy is a hilarious counterpoint to the harried teens, and the briskly moving scenes explore some of the major issues of growing up as we see shifting alliances and connections. High school directors take note!

Beautiful, hilarious, and brilliantly theatrical! I would be eager to dive into this as an actor, director, or designer. Oglesby examines the loneliness, yearning for connection, and toxic romantic/sexual environment of gay male culture using a really unique extended metaphor that is both so on target and so original. Skip, the sympathetic nucleus of this piece, is thrust on a zany and offbeat journey, and Oglesby makes hilarious use of double/triple/etc-casting to emphasize his loneliness. As poignant as it is funny, the truths explored here feel specific to this LGBTQ context and universal in scope.

Extraordinarily powerful and unsettling, Mildred Lewis manages to so sharply illustrate the ways that white supremacy, hatred, and bigotry births, foments, and overtakes in an eerily quiet and subtle two-hander. Susannah and Enoch are deftly rendered characters who are multi-dimensional. At the same time that Lewis shows them to be human, she just as acutely shows the roots of their hatred and dehumanization of black people. I was awed by how well this piece works as a small, specific story and as a microcosm of the toxic cycle of prejudice and oppression. The ending is chilling.

I loved this unique, nuanced play that centers specifically defined individuals while so deftly tackling universal questions of growing up, life on the cusp of 30, and the human desire for legacy and meaning-making. Gipson fully explores the intersectional identities of each character and makes it clear with deft showing vs. telling how those identifiers inform the characters' life experiences. The scenes move briskly and are full of surprising yet subtle turns both in content/relationship shifts and in textual rhythms. Just when I was feeling done with Becca, she was beautifully, swiftly humanized without cliche or sentiment. Lovely piece!

I loved how this play worked on many levels--structurally, thematically, and comically. Burdick devised an infinitely clever concept here and, once the initial joy and hilarity of seeing all of these famous faces coexisting in one supernatural space passes, he's already dived into the meaty thematic center of the piece. The exploration of fame and its cohabitation with self-destruction and a yearning to connect, the evolution of music, and regret are just a few issues tackled here. Each music icon is both recognizable and nuanced. There is much to play with here with sound/lighting/set design as well!