Recommended by John Bavoso

This is such a clever, supernatural takedown of biphobia and bi-erasure in the queer community. Perfect for queer festivals, Halloween shows, and everything in between, this is an entertaining short play with a message. Highly recommended!

Andrew is so, so good at weaving visual tapestries and striking images out of words—but it’s the real, complex characters at the center of these visuals that give his work such power. There are so many elements of this play that could easily have meandered into cliche, but instead we get a grounded, authentic exploration of trauma, homophobia, familial and romantic love, and identity. Everyone should be reading (and producing) Andrew's work!

Moench has created such a fascinating, bleak world in MOTHERS. The first act contains such amazing microaggressions and snideness (I can just imagine sitting in an audience and hearing everyone around me going "oooo" at so many of the lines), and then the second act is relentlessly Sarah Kane-esque. It not only shows the playwright's range, but her deftness at making the two acts flow so well together and reveal the shifts in power along racial and gender lines. I highly recommend giving it a read and I hope I get to see a production one day!

A truly dark and disturbing play that looks at toxic masculinity and violence in a totally different way than I’ve seen before. I didn’t know where the story was going from one page to the next, and it was both hard to read and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny. This is a play that will provoke a wildly polarized reaction amongst audiences—which is appropriately reflective of the subject matter itself.

In this eerie play, Meager has managed to create a world that feels both sprawling and claustrophobic at once. It is imbued with a sense of foreboding that builds and creeps up on you. While it’s like a mashup of the Cassandra myth and the Salem witch trials, this play still has a lot to say about feminism, isolationism, and borders in the present. I’d love to see an ambitious company take this on!

I recently had the privilege of watching Darcy work in person and was in awe of how they pack so much feeling and poetry into each play—and this is no exception. The word I keep coming back to is “aching.” Using a well-known Bible story as a foundation, Darcy explores such huge concepts as trauma and its aftermath, longing for a home, and impossible love in intimate ways through the oft-overlooked lens of working-class queer folks. I can’t wait to see this come alive on stage—and the rest of this epic cycle of plays as well!

An achingly beautiful play that empathetically lays bare how broken our systems are and how damaging keeping parts of yourself secret can be. And yet, this play also shows how, even now, in the most dire of circumstances, two unlikely strangers can bridge the gap and build a community. Kearns has a way of writing dialogue that is both gorgeous and naturalistic. Do yourself a favor and produce this stunning, timely play!

This play definitely lives up to the hype. In the same vein as Shakespeare’s R&J and that episode of My So-Called Life that incorporated Our Town, Belflower has crafted a timely, contemporary piece in conversation with a classic text. Full of funny and profound dialog that actually sounds authentically like teenagers talking, this is a thought-provoking piece that should be produced far and wide. Highly recommended!

Talk about an indecent proposal! This play is bizarre, macabre, yet heartwarming in a really strange way? Moore and Walker do an excellent job showing how two strangers can come together even in the most baffling of circumstances. I’d love to see this live one day!

I freakin’ love this play! Dark, sexy, smart, and surprising, it’s an original take on our society’s fraught relationship with masculinity, both within and outside the queer community. I imagine this would be a delicious piece to design and act in, and a show audience would be talking about for a long time. Highly recommended!