Recommended by Dave Osmundsen

A brilliantly unsettling yet deeply compassionate play about friendship, grief, and the horrors that await us in both dreams and reality. Smith has created a beautiful friendship between Lily and Joy, and despite the play’s brevity, you get a full sense of their relationship dynamic. The horror elements are beautifully executed, and the play succeeds in suspending the audience somewhere between reality and fantasy, to the point that you don’t always know where you are, creating a feeling of delightful unease. Fantastic work!

“Welcome to Keene, New Hampshire” takes a page from Thornton Wilder’s seminal play “Our Town” and transports us to a real-life small town in Southern New Hampshire. However, Polak’s play goes deeper to explore wider social issues, such as alt-right movements, gun violence, the opioid epidemic, and trans identity, each treated with the right amount of weight and attention. This play is also rife with snarky humor and poignant musings about our place in the universe. A messy play that doesn’t offer easy answers and allows the audience to contemplate life itself. Wonderful work!

So a Samuel D. Hunter play walks into a Taylor Mac play…

Tucker-Meyer displays a gift for linguistic acrobatics in this charming and delightful comedy about three deeply superficial dandies and a nondescript “Dude” who taps into his inner fabulousness with their help. Unabashedly queer, open-hearted, and delectable as the most scrumptious donut, this play will make you want to be your most fabulous self.

Sickles plunges into some dark territory with this piece! Fusing both social horror (the devastating impact of society's apathy towards the death of gay man) and psychological horror (the inner workings of a sociopathic serial killer), this terrifying short play cycle explores innocence, desire, homophobia, trauma, and revenge with economic and delicately-formed language. Most effective are Ellen's monologue (a mother's desperate plea for answers) and Basyl's monologue (a chilling rumination on revenge).

Barsanti shows an incredible gift for creating compelling, relatable, and complex characters. She lovingly satirizes the foibles and anxieties of millennials without cruelty, and you feel so much empathy for the three friends at the center of this play. This play also makes a bold statement about the millennial need to change the world, and how efforts to ameliorate the world can prove futile—but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. Part female buddy comedy, part millennial satire, and part environmental allegory, this is a rich and satisfying play that I want to see produced!

How do we move forward when the past seems to be always holding us back? How do we deal with scorched-earth family relations? Considine doesn't offer easy answers, but she does provide us with dynamic characters and relationships. Isabella's interior monologues especially are hilarious and heartbreaking.

Reminiscent of family dramas such as "Next to Normal" and "Ordinary People," this compelling and rich play explores how one family copes with a devastating and traumatic event. Their journey towards healing and reconciliation is heartfelt and realistic. Halton is a playwright who loves his characters deeply--everyone is flawed, but no one is the villain, and everyone is believable. There is also a healthy dose of humor and laugh-out-loud lines through the play.

Spectacular, poetic, devastating, thrilling, gut-wrenching, moving. These are only a few adjectives I can use to describe this incredible play. Centering on four boxers all fighting for their version of the American dream, this hard-hitting play asks what dreams are worth fighting, striving, and ultimately dying for. Intersecting bloodsport with cosmology, this play aims high and smashes its target. This play also contains some of my favorite monologues from any contemporary play—the poetry contained in them will stun you. Bravo!

A dark, spirally, and heavily theatrical odyssey exploring one woman’s journey in coming to terms with her sexuality, Neurodiversity, and identity. The fantastical elements are a blast, heightening the theatricality of the play while giving you insight into the protagonist’s mental state. This isn’t always a pleasant play to read, but it will put you back together in the most satisfying manner after putting you and it’s protagonist through the ringer (and there is plenty of brilliant dark humor along the way!).

What a lovely, lovely play! Cathro gives us a believable father/daughter dynamic. Amanda and her father don't have a contentious relationship, exactly, but there's the question of how much they're willing to give each other, and their conversation here compellingly explores that disparity. Cathro doesn't condemn Amanda for being less giving. Much like Dad, he is very sympathetic to the child who may not be aware of how selfish she's acting. You're left with the possibility that both of these characters can learn and grow from each other, and the play ends on a hopeful note.