Recommended by David Beardsley

I saw the KC Rep stream of Legacy Land (Logan Vaughn, dir.). It's remarkable, powerful, haunting, funny, unflinching, courageous. It's hard to watch, but so beautifully crafted I didn't want it to end. The dreamscapes and memory moments are strange and compelling, bringing the most painful elements of this play front and center--live theatre at its most visceral best. The characters are flawed and damaged and strong. Barbara is a role for the ages. This play deserves to have a very long life on the stage and should earn the highest accolades available to truly great drama, because it's great.

I will add my two cents to the avalanche of well-deserved praise for this play. I watched Know Theater's online performance of Alabaster, about two women damaged and isolated by loss and grief but beginning to heal each other with the help of goats. Goats! How awesome. It's a beautiful play, with complex and powerful characters, but the goats help it land with such force. They highlight the devastating effects of isolation (you know you're in trouble when you talk to goats and they talk back), and they allow the unspeakable to be spoken, which is how healing begins.

This is a terrific philosophical satire that comments on humanity's tendency to think of itself as somehow existing outside and above nature. Three lady bugs debate the existence of a higher power and species more important than them, as unseen humans argue about the importance of respecting nature and not killing lady bugs. I saw it as part of the Boston Theatre Marathon's 2020 online readings (moved online during the coronavirus outbreak) and it worked so well in that medium. The atheist lady bug got my favorite line, something like: "Yes, there are other species, but they're aphids." Satirical gold.

The Message of Pain is a haunting piece of science fiction that skillfully depicts the fragility of human life and the emptiness that's results from isolation and a life devoid of the simple pleasures of human connection. It's a bleak play, but one that also leaves us feeling thankful for the time and relationships we have.

I just saw this at Steppenwolf's First Floor Theater and loved it. It's creepy. It's funny. It's weird. It bends time, or maybe it just ignores it. But does it matter if you can escape the laws of physics, when you can't escape your own demons? I don't know. I'll figure it out later. It's later. I still don't know. But I loved it.

This is such a well-crafted, touching real, and funny play! The characters are beautifully drawn and their dilemma is so poignant. It deals with aging in an unflinching but respectfully comic manner This play should have a long life at festivals.

I thoroughly enjoyed hearing this play at the 2020 Mid-America Theatre Conference. It is a powerful and moving examination of a closely held secret in playwright Arthur Miller’s life: his rejection of a son born with Down Syndrome.

This is an important play. I had an opportunity to hear Franky Gonzalez read this play live, and it was one of the most powerful theatre experiences I've had. The pain at the center of Paletas de Coco is devastating. The honesty with which Gonzalez confronts that pain and tells his story is inspiring and harrowing. We all try to write truthfully, but few people ever succeed to this degree. I hope this play is produced everywhere. It really should be.

Persephone is a poignant play about grief, and the conflict one feels about getting on with life (or in the title character's case, with death) after a terrible loss. The writing is beautiful and thought-provoking, and O'Grady strikes just the right balance between showing her characters beginning to heal while also acknowledging that they will never heal fully. Life goes on, but it's never the same.

A worthy inclusion in The Best New Ten-Minute Plays anthology for 2019. This play comes at you with the breakneck pace of the digital age, almost the way all those "attaboys" fill up your [insert social media here] feeds. And it asks a worthy question: Has social media commoditized praise to the point that we've all forgotten what it really means to do good? I would love to see this play on stage. It would be fun! (Now, quick, someone pat me on the back for writing an NPX recommendation!)