Recommended by Nick Malakhow

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!

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.

I loved how this story was so subtly told and how fully-realized the characters were. Reid captures young people on the precipice of and then jumping fully into adulthood with a sensitive eye for the small seismic changes that occur between and within people, and the fractures that appear in relationships as people mature. The characters simmer with all of the uncertainty, loneliness, and desire to make an impact and meaning that all young 20-somethings experience. How wonderful that Reid communicates these truths in poignant, well-structured scenes that avoid unnecessary histrionics and that hit a more nuanced bullseye.

Mindbending, hilarious, and poignant! At the start of the script, Vanderark says that the play asks the question "When have we replaced too much?" and that really is such a potent, clear, and affecting throughline that guides the play and provides a unifying focus that really makes this piece so much more than just the sum of its parts. There is so much hilarity in here (particularly most times AI is meant to reproduce the thoughts and creative output of human beings) amidst the pervasive, touching, and undeniable reminders of what makes humanity human. Theatrical and bold!

A sublime play that opens with catastrophe at the fantastical/global level as well as the immediate familial level. From there, the sci-fi circumstances serve as a simple but powerful metaphor for the family implosion going on inside Brielle and Zachary's apartment. Vanderark provides enough details about the world to make the circumstances potent, but then skillfully focusing on the human heart of the play. The treatment of each flawed character is very sensitive--they are rendered with deft skill and are all clearly fighting their own impossible battles. The ending is a poignant, time-bending, stop-motion-animation-like punctuation mark.

I enjoyed the kaleidoscopic nature of this play. Even just reading it, I found it evoking in my mind smells, saturated colors, soundscapes, and rhythms. I appreciated how the characters felt vividly-rendered but also like a unique and fierce ensemble. There's so much to work with here with regards to movement, visual storytelling, compelling stage pictures, and environmental staging! The irregular rhythms of the piece were fun and I loved how they highlighted the strobe-light-like flashes of human connection within. The fantastical Nathan/Jonah love fable in the middle was beautiful and poignant. The ending was affecting and startling.

A wildly theatrical piece with an extremely human heart beating throughout. I love the pastiche of horror-satire-fantasy-coming-of-age-dramedy that this play lives within. The world is mindblowing, eclectic, cohesive, and fully-realized. Walker pointedly uses the thread of werewolf mythology to explore coming of age, identity discovery, shame, desire, and the push-pull of repressing or realizing those overwhelming forces in a limiting society. I flew through this in one sitting--it is hi-LARIOUS, sexy, horrifying, and poignant at key moments. I loved seeing Junyce/Kyle and Huck/Beecher as two different models for coping with these desires and internal conflicts. An amazing piece!