Recommended by Michael Goodwin Hilton

So I guess I'm sort of biased because I knew before even reading this that it would be erudite and hilarious. But I read it anyway, and you should too, because it's erudite and hilarious. Chris has the uncanny ability to heighten our everday, bone-splintering financial anxieties to the point where we have no choice but to laugh at them and at ourselves for ending up in these messes that we learn to love ourselves for making. A play to read if you seriously need to laugh - like now -, and also sigh a little in relief.

This play rewrites the rules of the addiction narrative. Eschewing the more standard trope of romantic self-destruction, Vovos presents an account of heroin addiction and recovery that is as accessible as it is harrowing, all the more so for its assertion that drug addiction doesn't override our rational capacities so much as commandeers them. This is a theatre piece to experience with all of you: mind, body, heart, nerve endings. Even if you haven't (hopefully!) gone through what Brian has, you will come away feeling changed somehow - challenged, tried, encouraged. Can't be recommended enough.

A heartbreaking short play, all the more so for its conciseness, its understated tragedy, its whallop of a slowly and painfully building realization that shatters the reader at the same time that it satisfies through its artful handling of trauma, addiction and the lasting effects of split-second decisions on our loved ones.

An incisive and deeply unsettling indictment of a prison system that sustains slavery in all but name. Wyndham writes with a rhythm, grace, and boundless compassion reminiscent of Ntozake Shange.

A poignant and purposeful insight into how one of our greatest poets became immortal despite herself. A meditation on how some of history's most marginal figures, here the maid, can turn out to be the most consequential. A beautifully written portrait of isolation, legacy, and the providence of our intuitions.

If Beckett could enrapture us by bringing lights up and then down again like a breath, and if John Cage could spellbind us by returning music to silence, then Matthew Weaver's "A Blank Stage" surely has a seat at the table of truly compelling minimalist art - a piece of theatre propelled and necessitated by absence that makes the audience critically reflect on why it's there in the first place, but there's also the question of why the hell not. A brave and very funny piece.

A sardonic and insightful snapshot of Shelley's life as she transitions from wife to widowhood and, more importantly, from domestic companion to godmother of the horror genre. Carnes has that rare ability to bestow outstanding depth to her characters and their worlds with the lightest of strokes, butterfly flutters of language that set into motion far-ranging ideas and reflections.

The play riffs like a Springsteen song, exuberant yet charged by a driving melancholy; and it expands like an O'Keeffe painting, pressing outward against the audience's expectations. Joe and Britt are alive in ways that some of the greatest onstage couples are - George and Martha, Brick and Maggie - passionate and contradicting. Their love is at once daring and endangered, and their story is deeply affecting.

A gorgeously written play which alternates, like the storm that precedes and prompts it, between flashes of brilliant color and torrents of darkness. Gina manages to negotiate, with Chekhovian intricacy, a relationship that is believably both intimate and estranged. I laughed on nearly every page, which is all the more remarkable since the play will break your heart with each jarring revelation - and stun you with the depth and range of its humor and its heart.

A haunting and resonant piece that bears witness to an unspeakable tragedy by anticipating its innevitability. With the lightest of strokes, Carnes manages to make us feel the weight of violence and injustice.