Recommended by Donna Hoke

I was fortunate to see an intimate and early incarnation of this show at the 2013 Dramatists Guild conference, and have just read the newest version. If possible, it's even more compelling, more precise, more haunting, more personal. You can't walk away without rethinking everything you thought you knew. A beautiful piece of work.

From the spot-on character descriptions straight through to the end, the laughs simply do not let up. Expertly wrought and exquisitely fine-tuned, this play is the rare comedy that has just as much weight as it does humor. Downs is a true talent in this arena.

What a stunningly accurate portrait of friendship and relationships and our inability to stop friends from getting hurt. Niles' page 55 monologue alone makes this worth reading, but Scott's ear for reality shines throughout.

A compelling character drawn in record time. I hope to see Don Ponzo as part of a longer work in the future

I first saw this as a ten-minute play several years ago, something I realized instantly the minute I began reading--clearly, the characters had stayed with me. I much enjoyed the fleshing out of the main character's backstory and the flashback visuals that were only in memory in the shorter version.

There is another popular play about the death of a child that has never felt real to me; it feels like a journalist has gathered facts and was unable to imbue them with any sense of truth about this specific grief. This play has done what that one could not; it is full of painful and heartbreaking truth, exquisitely expressed (Emily's monologue is PERFECT) and, in the end, like a Pandora's box of grief, a tiny shred of hope emerges.

Good humor, good music, and a good love story combine in a musical that proves the right person can be wrong for all the right reasons (it's complicated!)

Always tackling big issues with a subtle and deft hand, Stephen Kaplan uses one home in danger of extinction to illustrate how we are more similar than we are different and that we can't go home again because we never really leave.

With his usual comedic flair, Kaplan takes a satiric look at what happens when a system decides somebody--in this case a puppet child of puppet parents--needs to be just like everybody else, for his own good. At turns heartbreaking and hilarious, this play resonates across so many current issues but without a heavy hand.

Stephen Kaplan has a fine-tuned sense of comedy, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have anything to say. Quite the opposite, this comedy serves as biting commentary on the culture of helicopter parents who believe every child is destined for great things--and what happens when the child doesn't quite live up.