Recommended by Rachael Carnes

A delightful adventure into corporate culture, with puppets - or a puppet. I love Mooney's investigation of the loopy power plays and asinine artifice that seem to take hold, until everyone is using the same jargon and no one is making any sense at all. This play's a nugget — Fun, fresh, would be a delight to direct or perform in, with so much weird-but-believable-because-work-is-weird action and universal truth.

Gorgeous dialogue and funny as anything — This winning play zips and hurdles through all kinds of conversations about race, power, money — With style, humor and a good wallop of truth. Oh — how I love this writer! Michelle Johnson's characters seem wrought from a universal source, and the intricacies of their jostling and differences is handled so easily and so effectively, this becomes a gold-standard example of how to pull off multiple person plays. Not sure HOW Johnson manages to make an investigation of these weighty themes look so effortless. But I'm so grateful she has! Brava.

Gripping — Goes straight for the jugular and doesn't let go. And underneath the ferocious language and rhythm, lives a kind of poetry, a delicate, subtle backstory, as though the writer can hold our hearts and minds on the nerve that aches every time these characters imagine a future that might have been. In TV, or movies, it's easy to be dismissive, to fill in the idea of "prison" with our own presuppositions, accepting mere caricatures. Writer Gonzales doesn't let us do that here, painting a masterwork with depth, dimension, despair and divination. This beautiful play is a gift.

Oh man — This is so wacky and fun! I love the imagistic approach! Visual and punchy and just refreshingly *silly*. WHERE IS THE ONION COSTUME? I MUST SEE IT ONSTAGE! The one in my mind is glorious after reading this play. Writer Weaver gets at the heart of agricultural dramas. Heck — He dominates the entire field! NO ONE is writing about root crops. It's Weaver's creative imagination that leads us there. Love this one.

Powerful and real, a slice of life for a family on the precipice of losing all they’ve known. I appreciate Burdick’s dynamic, fearless punch into the messy and meaningful world of caregivers struggling to accept and support while their loved ones adjust to a new normal. In this moving play, no one’ll go down without a fight.

From the get-go, writer Francis Boyle gets at the heart and heartbreak of war — The stuff of plays since time immemorial. And yet, how perceptive and evocative, for the writer to ask the reader or producer to shuttle the language - the war vocabulary - across time, leaping mournfully through centuries of carnage. I've not really seen that done before -- And Boyle does it beautifully. This play is achingly timeless, and remarkably human.

Asher Wyndham is one of my favorite writers on NPX, and this monologue might be my favorite monologue yet. Hilarious, compelling, whip-smart — The staging is so evocative, the character so sympathetic and tragic and wonderful. I just wanna be friends with this character and hang out with him and binge-watch 'Cupcake Wars'. Wyndham has a sensitive hand with difficult subject matter — And here, he just lets loose, and is funny as hell. Bravo!

A beautiful window into a moment between two people on the verge of intimacy, this play creates a relationship to history, while attending to the immediacy of the choices we make -- right now. Impressive, sympathetic and richly developed characters move through this powerfully compelling plot. Writers could study Hoke's construction here, as a how-to on the 10-minute play form. Exquisite work.

This play! Compelling, universally relatable, charming, with this molten core of love and confusion and grief, in other words, a real family. Thanks to the writer for this beautiful piece, a reminder that depth and richness are both possible, within the confines of just ten pages.

This play explores timeless and timely themes for all audiences, with humor, empathy and a flair for character. I so enjoy the visuals here and imagine how easily viewers would connect to and respond to this work. A perfect contribution to any festival of plays on our relationship to the environment and its future. Lovely.