Recommended by Doug DeVita

There is so much heart in this play – even Arnold, the AI nursing app appears to have one – that one can't resist its poignant charms. Mendoza hooks you early on with recognizable characters and their personal conflicts, then carries you along on wave after wave of emotional truths, and then WHAM, he guts you with losses that, while inevitable, are nonetheless heartbreaking. A truly inventive, wonderful work.

This quietly shattering work builds in intensity, like a gathering storm, until it finally breaks over an already broken family haunted by the ghosts of their past, and leaves one, like the family at the center of this hurricane of a play, both destroyed but hopeful.

Youth, beauty, indeed, the very act of making love (or to be blunt, fucking) is fleeting. But art can be immortal. And in this charming short play Rinkel wittily makes a case for a probable WH, immortalized by Shakespeare in his sonnets; there is no sex at all between the writer and his early 17th Century Rent Boy, and yet the sexual tension is high and the encounter between WS and WH reaches a more than satisfying climax.

The language. THE LANGUAGE! The eloquence of these brutish characters is exciting, funny, heartbreaking, and breathtakingly precise. As is their theatricality. Sickles is firing on all cylinders here, and anyone who reads, or better yet sees this reaps the benefits. Simply wonderful.

I love this play so much it hurts. In a very dreamlike, at times almost nightmarish way, Goldman-Sherman gets right to the heart of the good, the bad, and the ugly of the parent/child relationship, and without being preachy or judgmental, rips at the unresolved conflicts that haunt us throughout our lives. And it’s not without humor, either. DREAM TALK is an unsettling, but cathartically beautiful work.

Hoke's imagining of a final meeting between tempestuous stage and film stars (and former husband and wife) Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier is a glittering and utterly savage look at what might have been; the zingers fly, the emotions are high, and underneath is the anguish of two people whose fierce love was the undoing of them both. Fascinating and heartbreaking, right up to the kicker ending.

Comparisons are, of course, odious, but there does seem to be a spate of work recently which chronicles the fallout from that infamous trip to a chocolate factory over 50 years ago. In Arthur M. Jolly’s account — which is a brief golden nugget of a play — the action is concise and intense: it has its funny moments, but on the whole “The Survivor’s Club” is far more bitter than sweet. And for those of us who like dark chocolate as well as the lighter varieties, it’s just right too.

Noah’s Ark in space with three of those blundering Stone Age cut ups we’ve known and loved since childhood: Fred, Barney, and Betty (but not Wilma, whose common sense is sorely needed.) Another hilarious stream-of-consciousness fun-fest from Carnes, replete with a foreboding darkness simmering under its brightly candy-colored surface.

There’s a lot of power packed into this short play, power which is detonated in expertly mixed bursts of thought-provoking humor and pathos by characters whose wants and needs drive them to seek freedom at any cost, in whatever form it means for them personally. Sharply drawn with hauntingly eloquent colloquialisms, “Biscuit, CB, and Whatshisface” stings with both shame and joy, in equal measure.

One of the strongest plays about grief I’ve ever read, Shelli Pentimall Bookler’s “All The Dead Biddles” is weird, at times surreal, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, and often gut-wrenching. Just like the grieving process.