Recommended by Scott Sickles

That this play is as adorable as it is dark is nothing short of miraculous! Feriend takes a harrowing true story of a high school football team that perished in a plane crash and boldly asks, “what about the other team?” In so doing, she creates a powerful indictment against how HS football culture’s Anything to Win attitude makes its kids pay the price for the ambitions of unfulfilled adults. There’s a call for decency amidst the laughs and the cringes. GO, TEAM!

A beautiful love story taking place in the divide between idealism and pragmatism, a rather murky valley indeed when it concerns sexuality and family. Jolly presents us with a loving gay couple with dreams, disappointments, and complications. Subtle human drama with no histrionics, just honesty, compassion and a terrific analysis of amusement parks thrown in for good measure. Simple to stage and a treat to perform.

It’s amazing what a good sandwich can do at the right time.

Williams’s musing on the ebb and flow of inspiration, creativity, and marriage is utterly delightful. O, the agony when all of one’s best ideas belong to other people who did them better! But while there is frustration, this play spares us angst, instead providing joyful banter between two people who know and love each other. Their push-pull is so comfortable and natural, you feel that you know them, too. We want Joel to find the inspiration he craves even more than Liz’s sandwich!

UFOs, nerds, and a gruelingly detailed drop-down menu! It’s like Emily McClain wrote this just for me!

Hark and Laurel are sublimely and breathtakingly funny. The details that comprise the notes of their conversation and contretemps are downright symphonic in scope. Marvelously individuated characters on a night both ordinary and unlike all others during a unique period in history.

This play captures their passion for oddity and the extraordinary, opening their arms wide hoping to find the tiniest connection in an infinity of possibilities that may never come to pass. Like clusters of distant galaxies, SHAPE is beautiful.

There is so much lovely here. Writing intellectually disabled characters is a tremendous challenge because one walks a perilous tightrope between caricature and stereotype. Charles is a miracle on the page! A long time ago, I had William's job and I knew a few Charleses. Martineau's rendering of both characters is perfect in accuracy and elegance. The contrasting discussion with Leah and Jay, like a river, flows, turns, and ripples until it hits hard rapids. Even the technical dialogue is remarkably naturalistic. This play is like eavesdropping on the right two conversations. A gorgeous piece of work.

Whoa! This did not remotely go where I was expecting it to! Floyd-Priskorn takes an adorably volatile setup and brings in some deep dark history, societal and personal. The characters are elegantly limited by their beliefs, especially when those beliefs are challenged. There is great kindness in here couched in agendas, resentment, and a need to be properly loved. Of course, “proper love” means different things to different beings. A page turner and an especially great opportunity for a costume designer!

One thing about a pandemic: clarity! At least for people like Jill who is sick and tired of the endless cycle she and Jack have endured. Now their tumble down the hill is even MORE precarious due to covid safety restrictions and she is fresh out of f***s to give. This one-page, one minute comedy is a great send up a familiar tale, but there's an important message here. Jill is my hero. Be like Jill.

There’s so much history between these characters in white space on the page, one could go snowblind in the emotion of it all. A break up play is one thing, a post-breakup goodbye play is a different hat trick. Feelings have been around longer: anger faded but still with a bitter aftertaste, love lingering like an old paint job. The characters use reminiscences to establish and infiltrate boundaries, parrying and enticing, saying things they’ve left unspoken too long. Yet, Williams gives them a profound immediacy and a hope that resonates like keys to a new life.

How do you give yourself a peptalk when you're trapped in a hell that would give Sartre pause? Researcher Hugh is doing his best, but he and playwright Speckman know too much to allow unfettered optimism. They both deal in facts. Facts about the current circumstances, personal historical facts, facts extrapolated into speculation and strategy, and the fact that emotions themselves are facts. Hugh's isolation is as palpable as its cost dire. Speckman takes us on a journey through time and space while Hugh forages for the strength to break his own gaze in the absence of others'. Haunting.

Damn...

Busser takes a tried and true apocalypse trope ("can we trust the stranger?"), adds a beloved comedy device (talking dog), and twists it into a Gordion Knot of tension, suspense, and sorrow. There's an elegant metaphor in here about protecting ourselves and one another, that broke my heart then sank it. We feel for all of these characters, hoping for mercy while understanding its limits. Extraordinarily atmospheric, even on a bare stage I imagine, with well drawn characters and impossible decisions, GUARDIAN achieves in ten minutes what similarly themed novels, films, and series dream of evoking.