Recommended by Sarah Jae Leiber

There is a joke in this play that is so funny and so clever that I laughed out loud just reading it on the page. Actors will make meals out of this material. McManus writes clearly-defined characters who are so grounded in their absurdity that it's impossible not to fall in love with them and their world. I understand Cowboy Law, and I respect it. But, more importantly, I understand, respect, and adore the characters who find Cowboy Law sacred.

McManus and collaborators have created a rock album virtually indistinguishable from something made contemporaneous to this story, and I hope they continue gaslighting audiences with their love for '70s rock for years to come. Unique in form, funny and sad in context, I feel like I know everything about Margaret and Danny's marriage simply through the way they speak to each other musically — so it is a gift to also have their 50 years of retrospective perspective playing out on top, like a beautiful live commentary track. Would be excellent for colleges.

Passionate, layered, funny, and dark, Senese-Grossberg has created something unique and enduring that lives up to its promise of being "the A-side of a Jane Austen novel and the B-side of a Mary Shelley novel." The scary, sexy, devastating Jewish Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein of your dreams. What does it mean to act out of line when you already have an identity-based target on your back? Who wins and who loses when oppressed people submit to an uncaring societal hierarchy to gain acceptance?

A quick and remarkable insight into what it feels like to be a people-pleaser tragically in touch with the part of themself that wants to please other people. Sometimes it really is like sinking! Beautiful work.

Sharp, funny, and a really smart way to create a digital theatrical space. Heyman captures the inherent absurdity of selling yourself before you can sell your soul to capitalism and — in eight pages, no less! — creates memorable characters, scenarios, and so many great jokes straight out of your worst nightmare.

This play is a really beautiful meditation on what it means to miss someone who's been gone longer than you knew them. American Jewish families have a very particular way of speaking to each other that Heyman really captures well here. Well done!

A sensitive, sharp play with some of the best one-liners I've read in a long time.

"Art Gets What it Wants" blurs lines — between art and artist, between friend and lover, between past and present, and between what we intend and how it's interpreted. You have to be pretty sick in the head to trust yourself enough to make something, so how fragile is that trust when you make something with someone else? Is it inherently romantic to collaborate?

More plays about art-making should be this interested in "why" and not "how."