Recommended by Nick Malakhow

An exquisite solo show that wades through identity, sexuality and sexual freedom, sexual assault, gender roles and hierarchies, and more with a combination of poetry, well-timed humor, and potent stage pictures. Gandhi makes excellent use of the solo form to explore Minu's relationship to her intersectional identity and her home (in all the multitudinous ways one can define that word). The early humor helps us establish a rapport with Minu/Minita--her experiences in India land like gut punches. Minu's complex relationship with her identity isn't wrapped with a tidy bow, but the ending is satisfying and beautiful.

This is a lovely, poignant, and original look at family, friendship, grief, and mortality. Teddy is a complex central character and to watch him process the death of Stephen as he does is engaging and thought-provoking. I appreciated the forward and backward jumps in time. Rather than making the story feel disjointed, these time leaps helped reveal much about the Teddy we see in 1992, while also providing new context and framing around his journey with grief and life as a gay man during the AIDS crisis. The supporting characters are just as vivid and well-realized as Teddy too!

What an amazing piece! This quiet, nuanced, and unassuming two-hander gives us a couple of really distinct and brilliantly-rendered characters and explores friendships and how they evolve, age divides, abortion, and many other topics in a briskly-paced 90 or so minutes. At the same time, it never feels overstuffed with issues and keeps its laser focus on its likeable, flawed, and multi-dimensional central characters. The conversations are funny and human, the conflicts and motivations Olivia and Maggie both bring to the table are incredibly potent, and the surprises are subtle but supremely affecting.

A complex and subtle piece with a great ensemble cast of eclectic personalities and perspectives. Bennett really captures not only a sense of place and time within the restaurant world itself, but also the broader landscape of Philly and the world around these characters enclosed in the hermetically sealed world of the play. Without resorting to overdone theatrics, Bennett traces Jefferson's powerful and realistic arc of contemplating leaving his safe haven, a setting full of the stifling comfort that stymies growth and opportunity. All of this is impacted and complicated by each character's unique intersectional identity. Nuanced work!

A super beautiful, touching, and tenderly-constructed play with a great respect for its nuanced characters. The central conflict is based on an original variation on discussions of parenthood and how adults attach having children to making meaning with their lives, and it has far-reaching impacts and begins major conversations among the two couples in organic ways. I loved the symmetry between Andy's art and his latent desires to have a child. The characters' soliloquies were well-placed and well-written, and I appreciated the glimpses into their inner lives. The ending was affecting, surprising, and beautiful.

I enjoyed this charming, funny, and poignant script both as a playwright and a theater educator! Vansant uses fantasy and mythology of dragons to deftly explore themes of outsidership and social pressures/expectations. Like the best fantasy, SPARK provides astute insights on humanity using the extraordinary to give perspective on our world. Not only are the themes and story compelling, but the characters are well-rendered, there are awesome roles for female and femme-identifying young actors, and the stage pictures and stage magic are versatile enough for production companies to dress up or down as needed. Great for schools too!

I love the bold, eclectic, and aesthetically cohesive world that Levine creates here! Having seen both the in person workshop and Zoom reading on HowlRound the other day, I can say that this piece lives off the page in a uniquely theatrical and compelling way in performance. I appreciate the use of music, multiple media formats, and heightened storytelling. The queering of Nosferatu and the world of vampires in general only serves to highlight issues of alienation, desire, fear, and belonging, both in the source story and the lives of queer individuals throughout time.

This is such a beautifully-realized exploration of a complex sibling relationship. We learn about Cherry and Peach's relationship in straightforward and potent scenes that range from small and powerful punctuation marks to longer and more revelatory moments. The thing I loved most about this play was how the love between the two characters was obvious at every moment. August makes the drama not about contrived melodramatics, but about these little earthquakes between the siblings and rumblings within each character as they figure out who they want to be to themselves and each other. Poignant, simple, hilarious, and gorgeous!

I was engaged and moved throughout my reading of this nuanced piece. I very much appreciated the unique and complex triangular relationship between Janey, Sondra, and Brian. Its evolution was filled with well-timed obstacles and subtle revelations (sometimes through recollections of the past) which kept the play moving at a steady pace. Osmundsen tackles friendship and family--found/created/given--coming to terms with mortality, grief, and moving beyond toxic relationships in ways that honor these weighty and familiar themes while exploring them in ways that avoid both cliche and reliance on sentiment--the unique humanity of these characters' circumstances is lovingly rendered.

A cringe-inducing, foot-in-mouth tweet catalyzes a catastrophic wedding weekend and a family's reevaluation of their relationships to one another, race, and intersectional identity. Lily feels at first charmingly oblivious but, as the story progresses, her ingrained presumptions and prejudices reveal themselves to be more than just harmless misunderstandings. The conversations in this play are honest and fascinating, and I appreciated how well-rendered all of the characters were. Zito paints here an ostensibly liberal white family that is forced into uncomfortably open conversations they weren't ready to have but so needed to--a microcosm of a certain white American experience.