Recommended by Doug DeVita

  • Good Grief
    12 Jun. 2020
    Losing a loved one and how we deal with the grief is a very personal thing, a different experience for each of us. Williams’ disarmingly charming short play shows us a highly idiosyncratic, yet good side to an emotion we all must face, and Dan, the character mourning the death of his father, has as good a way as any. Lyrical and lovely, this is a touching gem that heals.
  • Sock Puppet Fetish Noir
    12 Jun. 2020
    Weird, wonderful, and wildly funny. McBurnette-Andronicos' creative take on noir turns the genre upside down, and the laughs are non-stop. Dizzy, and delightful.
  • Chai
    11 Jun. 2020
    This deceptively simple work keeps peeling away at a mother/son relationship, and each layer reveals more complexity than meets the eye. A parent’s wants vs. a child’s needs are examined; and there’s no right or wrong: just two sides represented with unsparing honesty. It’s a quietly devastating work, but one that resolves beautifully, and just right.
  • Ghost Story
    10 Jun. 2020
    Lia Romeo's crisply written jewel sparkles with poignant wit and achingly beautiful romance. A love story, a ghost story, a story about race relations, an older woman / younger man relationship... Romeo weaves these all together with effortless ease by finding and capitalizing on the universal humanity in her characters and their story. A truly winning little gem.
  • MOSTLY CLOUDY
    10 Jun. 2020
    If the synopsis alone isn’t brilliant enough, it’s nothing compared to the actual play. What a smart, heartbreaking, hilarious, and profoundly witty spin on a comfortably familiar nursery rhyme, using unstable relationships, contemporary reliance on technology, and being tied to the digital world to tell its story. It is as mercurial as the changing winds which guide the titular clouds — and the work itself — into ever-changing shapes and moods, keeping one mesmerized and waiting to see what shape it takes next right up to it’s surprising, but inevitable conclusion. Terrific work.
  • "LITTLE LOUIS"
    9 Jun. 2020
    The tension starts with the first line and rises exquisitely right up to the last. Johnson’s masterful script, based on true events, provides two actresses with fun, meaty roles, and audiences/readers with a deliciously taut experience.
  • A House by the Side of the Road
    9 Jun. 2020
    I did not grow up in a household where baseball was ever a “thing,” but the four boys who lived next door were nuts about it, and the sounds of a game blaring through a transistor radio is as much a part of summer for me as long, soft twilights, lightening bugs, and the hum of cicadas. Williams captures all that, and so much more, in this lovely, lyrical piece in which a smart father imparts a few valuable lessons to his seemingly polar-opposite sons. Beautifully handled, all the way.
  • Madame
    8 Jun. 2020
    Kendra Augustin has written a richly textured period drama that transcends its time and setting to become a touching, beautifully written statement about the similarities – and marked differences – between a mother and daughter. No matter the characters and their concerns are and about Haitian royalty and their duties: their story is universal.
  • The Babel Project
    6 Jun. 2020
    The fiercely creative theatricality of Romero's work here left me thinking "Goddamn, this is what I love about the possibilities of writing for the stage, and man, how I'd love to see this performed!"
  • BLOOD TIES
    5 Jun. 2020
    A sizzling confrontation between two strong-willed women – one black and one white – that says so much about freedom and the responsibilities that come with it, both personal and universal. And as tightly written as it is to read, to hear two gifted actresses spitting our Johnson's crackling dialogue would make for an intense, riveting experience I'd love to have.

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