Recommended by jose sebastian alberdi

Brenda Withers is undoubtedly a genius. This is a spooky, hell of a scary play that will make you laugh harder than you’ve laughed in a long time. It’s almost like Law & Order meets Twin Peaks, but funny funny funny. Brenda has a gift for circling a certain idea to its most comical extreme, and then shooting off to another idea, doing the same thing, all while making you reconsider your life and the forces that make it happen in between your laughs. She’s just so good! And this play is too.

You can be sober, you can be into it, you can say “yes”—but who’s in charge? This is a really subtle and intense play about the realization that a past sexual relationship maybe wasn’t as consensual as you thought it was, or wanted it to be. It’s a play about power. It’s about the oftentimes painful reckoning that occurs when someone realizes that, yes, maybe it happened to me too, and why am I so afraid to admit it? LOVE is one of my favorite plays I’ve read this year.

Honestly, I never knew what was going to happen next in this play. And that’s a good thing. From low-key adorable but menacing dancing vegetarian grizzly bears, to sibling interactions ranging from awkward to tender; Megan and the Bear Go Camping is a really gorgeous play. Zoe is able to really take us to a place where society still has difficulty going—honest portrayals of depression—and leaves us examining our own relationships to depression in our daily lives long after the play has ended.

The world created in Casey Colman is one that I’m still thinking about—Crystal Plains, Kansas, with all its tragedies and psychic energy being whipped around by people desperate to know what’s going to happen next in their lives. The Miss Angela workshop scenes had me laughing out loud at their cleverness and the amount of fortune-telling jargon that was being tossed about, and Casey’s dream scenes were works of sonic, and atmosphere-building genius! I can’t wait to see what’s in store for the (can’t resist) /future/ of this play!

I saw this play's reading at Campfire Theatre Festival and it honestly was one of my favorites of the weekend. I found myself humming "Candle's Out" after, thinking about the way songs can impact each of us so differently. Shualee has such a gift for taking something we think we know--songs--and making us think about their existences in a concrete, new way. I can't say enough about how great this play is! I laughed, I cried, I was angry, I was overjoyed, and by the end, I was rocking out with the whole cast. Bravo!