Recommended by Scott Sickles

Soucy has created not only my favorite protagonist ever, but the GREATEST PROTAGONIST OF ALL TIME!!!

ME!!!

O, I wish this Scott were me! Or I him. Either way, he’s a much better nerd and a much cooler guy. (Hey! Reverse Cool is still cool!) I never would’ve fared so well at dear Miskatonic U.

The perfect foil to my idealized doppelgänger’s bouncy cheer is the blithely eeeeevilllll Dr. Fract, whom I read with an English accent found only in the best B horror films! Deliciously wicked!

And then there are… the worms!!!

A disgusting delight!

What elegant vitriol!

If mental illness is a street fight, then depression is a cage match. And even though our protagonist is taken unawares by this latest onslaught, they are a fighter, a warrior! Their fists are calloused and they know every inch of this cage.

Plumridge also captures depression as contagion. It affects others, how they feel in addition to how we feel about them. It shows you the ugly in the beautiful and the hollow illusion of love. Doesn't matter if it's real. Doesn't matter if you know that.

At this point, the fight is everything!

A great contemporary spin on a classic trope! Indeed, genetic tests and genealogy sites have resulted in many surprises! And not all of them are happy. If they were, we wouldn't be writing plays about them.

Deb Cole has written a play!!! A perfect trio of characters: a mom with a fading memory is confronted by a drama princess daughter demanding to know more, and a sister/aunt who calls things as she sees them.

Funny and surprising, with a well-earned resolution and a lovely (and maybe slightly unsettling, at least for Bree) ending.

This play made me happy about three things: I’ll never be in primary education again, I’m not in it now, and I got to experience this stunning play!

On the surface, we see conversational snippets between three kids (likely boys) from kindergarten thru senior year. Blevins captures each age perfectly: as personalities evolve, power dynamics become increasingly unsettling.

BTW, each vignette is set during a lockdown drill! We learn what goes into these drills as the kids do, watching helplessly as they’re desensitized and traumatized over time. Extraordinarily powerful, the ending is a jawdropper!

Absolutely sickening! It's political theater like this that should inspire outraged mobs to rally for an actually just cause!

Wyndham has been on fire lately with monologues on infringements against women's autonomy with ULLA and SISTER CONSTANCE... With EMERGENCY ATTORNEY, he takes things to a new level, a new low even, with one of the most contemptible characters anyone has ever created. It's one thing to follow objectionable laws, it's another to do so with such indifference to humanity. That it's all not only believable but undeniably accurate is horrifying.

You won't read anything more terrifying this October.

Not having a tight-knit extended family nor one steeped in religion, I'm often taken aback by how much power elder generations wield. Or think they wield.

Here, Flo's family is jeopardized by an age-old predicament: a son moving on from the life he was supposed to build on and pass down. Even worse, he's been ensnared by a woman of another faith. Baker steeps familiar tropes in a deeply personal reality, where family history is both weapon and salve. Flo and Aunt Nellie remind us people who live and think like this still exist and are capable of adapting.

Oh my god...

I second my esteemed colleague Mr Busser's warning: SKIP THE SYNOPSIS! GO IN COLD!

What a gift it will be for unsuspecting audiences to watch the drama unfold. A truly inspired narrative tapestry combining and even unifying disparate tropes to tell a tale as comfortably familiar as it is mindblowingly unique.

People will leave feeling better about the world, themselves, each other, and the state of theater, all while asking... "what the hell did I just watch???"

You watched SEPTEMBER IN BIDDEFORD, people! Know you are blessed.

I may be biased because I'm IN IT!!! (Thanks for the cameo, Chris!)

What Plumridge has fashioned out of creepy echoes from the social media void is a highly funny, blithely surreal tale of persistent menace met with gloriously understated English reserve. The mundanities of family life are upended by the escalating presence of this message, culminating in a critical mass of chaos!

I won't tell you if Joe ended up doing the thing yet, but Plumridge certainly has!

You know from the get-go what's going on and what's gonna happen. Then you find out, YOU'RE WRONG! Multiple imaginations are at work, specifically the playwright and his protagonist conspiring to fashion magic and memory. There are a few holiday tales going on at once, like unwrapping a present to find another present inside and another after that... only this time there's a gift in each box. Any sentimentality (and I mean, it's a Christmas story about a little girl so...) is balanced with working class strife and real world loss. Start unwrapping this one now!

Gauge strikes me as someone who's been told over and over, "If you want people to take you seriously, maybe you shouldn't dress like that." By the people who are supposed to be their allies!

Peaceful revolutions are hard enough when you're part of a movement, but when you're a movement of one as well as an outlier among other outliers... Sisyphus had it easy by comparison. Medlin perfectly conveys the anguish of justice stifled on all sides, from the righteous indignation to the unstoppable determination to the morbid facts of potential consequences. A powerful rant!