Recommended by C. Meaker

I was just recommending this play to a friend who politely asked if it was on NPX. Lo and behold it is! Even several years later, I still think about this unique play and the experience of sitting in the office with the characters, trying to find a reason for the way we continue on even when things are the worst. This was Chekhov's bailiwick, of course, which is why Healy is a brilliant writer in the way he uses Chekhov's words to tell a modern story about the mundane and absurd quality of office work.

Green's play is about the brutality of being young — wanting too much, believing that hard work always pays off, and intense friendships — while making space for harsh realities and hilarity. I was floored by the extreme humor mixed with utter devastation and destruction enacted by young female characters. This play would be killer for college students!

I've been lucky enough to read this play in several stages of development and it guts me each time. Erika is able to articulate something honest, sexy, and dangerous about queer desire and the kind of witchery it is. To do all that and tell a story that tackles reproductive justice is truly amazing.

This sweet, earnest play examines grief and friendship by looking at the world through a temporal rip in the universe that allows us to see how our lives might be different. Rather than a simple "grass is greener" metaphor, this play shows the complicated and messy lives of teenagers who have experienced too much loss on both sides of the rift. At times funny and incredibly moving, the play allows a younger cast to explore deep feelings through a sci-fi lens.

This play confronts college theater (and the professional environment we're asking students to participate in) by looking at fat body politics in action and the ways in which we ask fat bodies to be smaller. But it doesn't just wallow in sadness like a lot of our media. No, it's funny and dark and honest, and gives every character so much to do, allowing everyone to examine how we all participate in fatphobia. It's a play I wish had existed when I was in undergrad.

In the first half of this play, I was laughing so hard I couldn't stand it and then the play turns, because of course it does. This powerful play is an amazing opportunity for young students to process the real violence they face alongside the joys they will remember years later. Moss shows the complex and deep feeling of adolescence and how easily things can be ripped away. It's so brilliant and I'm still mad I didn't write it.

Elle Thoni's script is wonderful, strange, funny, and so relevant not just to the topic of abortion, but queer identity. What I appreciate the most about this play is how it uses anachronism to make the parallels between then and now so gut-punching apparent. But of course, I also love a Rabbit King and Queen who guide our heroes toward magical means.

A hilarious play about the history of MSG and racist misinformation told from the perspective of a 90s teenage Japanese American girl struggling to accept and assert identity in one that prizes whiteness and Western values. Green is always funny with a dark, acerbic wit but it is Ami's reconciliation with her family, and understanding of her ancestors, that had me tearing up at the end. A beautiful and a badass play.

Green has an exceptional ability to create empathy even where you're not sure you want it. Wad examines a seemingly grotesque attraction between a high school student obsessed with true crime and a death row inmate twenty-one years her senior. Their exchanges deepen into hilarious and heart-breaking fantasy about the stories we tell ourselves about the bad things we do that we barely understand and the terrifying realities of murder and execution.

An unbelievably moving play about losing family and trying to find them. Through the conventions of DnD (and other dice throwing games) Polaris searches for his brother in alien terrain. Charles Green is able to take this journey play to unexpected, terrifying, and tearful places. Polaris is a play about how we process (or don't) our grief through imaginary worlds.