Recommended by Rudy Ramirez

EUROPA is a riveting piece: my body felt so engaged with what was happening in the reading alone that it took me doing some stretches to get it back together. Each of the characters earns the love of the audience as they struggle to connect through the aftermath of a horrific experience. You want, so badly, to take this away from them so that they can have their friendships without this burden, but the play doesn't let you forget the depth of the consequences. I have rapidly become obsessed with this piece.

At the heart of this funny, sexy, warm and poignant story is the transformation required to heal, the ways that art and love both teach us to turn our memories into something portable, so that we can survive letting go. ALABASTER lays this out with wit, style and a talking goat. I cannot wait for the chance to work on this beautiful piece.

I've been thinking about AMERIKIN frequently since the release of the latest report on Russian interference in the US election. Totalitarian propaganda is designed not to further a particular agenda, but to divide us, to keep us from trusting one another, to erode our faith in our nation's capacity to work together. AMERIKIN is not about Russian interference, but it is about the tremendous difficulty and danger of communicating across racial, economic and political lines with rigor and compassion. Hutchinson's story is anything but easy, equal parts welcoming and shocking, and absolutely necessary.

This play is dark, delicious and a fight choreographer's dream. The conflicts have a fun, cartoonish wildness that reminds me of Tarantino, only with a far more complicated and nuanced examination of race and the long term effects of trauma across generations.

If you grew up loving movies like Labyrinth and The Never-Ending Story, if you love the work of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, if you want a play that's complex enough to give your high schoolers great roles to chew on while being funny and fantastical enough for their friends to want to come see it more than once, you've come to the right place. Changelings has rich leads, great comedic showcase roles, and opportunities for rich design and even puppetry. The students who first got to act this play adored it, as did faculty, family and friends.

This play asks powerful questions about how our actions affect those closest to us and those on the other side of the planet. It's a play about education, literature, family and how we pay our debts to one another, told with Gabe's signature blend of compassionate, poetic realism.

As always with Reina's work, you learn so much about the astronomical forces that guide our universe and the even more unfathomable forces that guide our hearts, this time with the help of Aristophanes, Johannes Kepler and Henrietta Leavitt at a party in the center of the cosmos. Reina's plays make me braver and happier to be alive.

So excited to be producing this at The VORTEX this fall. There wasn't a dry eye in the house or on the stage at our first public reading. This is a play about why we see tragedy, how watching and even playing out the worst parts of ourselves is the way we learn to let go of our guilt and recrimination and forgive.

A powerful and exceptionally timely drama, UNDERGROUND is verbal chess match between two old friend over how they will work to liberate their people as the rising tide of white supremacy prompts revolutionary activism.

The first time I read Qualities of Starlight, I thought to myself, "This is one of the most satisfying plays I have ever read." The richness of the characters, the emotional arc of their journey, the beauty of the language, the blend of hilarity and heartbreak all combined to make this a play I had to direct, no question. Lucky me, I was able to do so, the result being one of the most beloved shows I have ever staged. People still talk about it. Stop reading this review and read it. Now. Trust me.