Recommended by Andy Boyd

This is a play that is equal parts anti-capitalist screed and touching character study. Within its short runtime Alex finds room for discussing the difficulties of care work, the complexity of Cuban-American identity, and the weirdly edifying process of putting on a giant rat costume. I also got to see Alex himself in the lead role, and the guy can act, too! Unfair, I say.

The sneaky thing about this play is that it's incredibly funny, so you don't realize at first that it's also a play with a big, beating heart at the center of it. The vignettes detailing the travails of online dating are sharply satirical, but the depth of Girl's desire for connection lends even the silliest jokes a great deal of emotional weight. And also funny, so funny, a very funny play.

J. Corey's play is a brilliant re-examination of the Robert Johnson legend told through the prism of African and African-American folklore. It's a play that asks, what do artists give up to follow our dreams, and is it worth it?

An absolutely brilliant play that uses the Pequot war and the paranoias that spawned it (and that it spawned) as a potent metaphor for he ongoing and seemingly endless war or terror. We see in visceral terms how fear of the imagined other binds is together as Americans. And it’s very funny.

Hayley St. James' For Leonara is a moving and provocative play about the power of the imagination. Nora's autism is not a barrier to happiness, its a bridge. It is through her obsession with the Oz books that she first connects with Stephanie, and it is through their connection that Stephanie comes to realize she may be autistic as well. This play is a quiet revolution.

A brilliant play! I had the pleasure of being in a writers group with Stefani while she was developing this play -- while the events it depicts were unfolding! Stefani has a great instinct for how to distill complex political ideas into theatrically vital situations. Produce this play!

This is a very weird play and I like it a lot. I think what it's really about is the invisible webs of connections joining everything together, in the environment and in the internet but also in deeper, subtler, spiritual ways. It's about how if it's true that we're all connected then one small choice by one person can change society in ways that person couldn't possibly have imagined. It's also mind-spinning smart and very funny.

Black Hollow is a moving, heart-felt, and disturbingly empathetic play about school shootings. This is a play that understands that tragedies like school shootings don't start when the first bullet is fired and don't end when the last body drops.

This play is a bold, theatrical reimagining of the mythological figure Hephaestus, disabled God of the forge. It's thrilling to witness a figure who is on the margins of so many important stories in Greek mythology finally get top billing! Johnson's Hephaestus is a cantankerous, brilliant, frustrated God. His arc is as complex as his character: this is not inspirational disability porn. The play is also very funny, and is sure to spark discussion. This is the kind of play you'll talk about for days.

In our current digital world, connection is often promised but never achieved. House of Karen explores what happens when one woman, Karen, decides to take the sharing economy up on its rhetoric and actually create a world based on...sharing. Her attempt to create a community from the flotsam and jetsam of our alienated contemporary culture is both touching and heartening. And the play is funny.