Recommended by Doug DeVita

We all had that one teacher who not only touched our life, but also molded it and sent us on the path to become who we were meant to become. Eytan Deray's "Educating Asher" is a loving tribute to one of those educators, and a beautiful play about grief, closure, and honor. Emotionally truthful, often funny, and achingly sad, it is an honestly moving work of art.

An enchanting piece inspired by Shakespeare's "Othello," "The Tempest," and "The Winter's Tale," Gwendolyn Rice's "The Tales of Wandering Grace (Or the Revengers' Tragedies)" is wonderful on its own merits. Rice certainly knows and loves her source material, and here she has fashioned a valentine to all things Shakespeare with its own distinct voice. It may be a challenge to produce, but oh, what an irresistible one, as the rewards from a creative production would be manifold.

Stunning monologue that perfectly captures the mounting desperation of a student saddled with oppressive student loan debt, and the lengths to which he’ll go to escape it. A sweeping indictment of both the staggering cost of an education and capitalism in this country, if this is a work in progress, I can only imagine what more Gacinski has in store for us with this piece.

It's no easy trick to present all sides of an argument fairly, and/or engender sympathy for characters who exhibit the heinous behavior nearly everyone in this play does at one point or another. Yet... Burdick pulls it off beautifully in "Accommodation," his infuriating, compassionate, angry, heartbreaking, and revealing exposé of the current, tangled state of education in this country. Burdick asks the hard questions, and wisely does not attempt to answer them completely. Smart work.

Like all good ‘50s style science fiction, Donald Loftus’ “Dark Matter” starts out innocently enough, and then little by little, something just doesn’t feel right, the paranoia starts to creep in, and the tension builds to a chilling climax. That Loftus achieves this in barely 10 pages is a testament to his ingenuity and talent.

This is a wonderful modern riff on Chaucer; funny, saucy, and with a rhyme scheme that often surprises with disarming and charming twists.

What a darkly humorous piece; in a mere six pages, Ruben Carbajal makes a strong statement about race relations and the inability to see what’s right in front of one’s eyes. And he does it without preaching — he simply tells his story honestly and without judgment. Great work.

Huge and sprawling. Intimate and focused. And so full of simple truths it hurts. A necessary epic, Brian James Polak's "Here Lies The Heart" is so many things all at once, all of them functioning together as a single, stunning work that speaks for yesterday, today, and tomorrow. This should be on his own list of plays that should be highly recommended, and produced. Everywhere and anywhere there are people who care about the state of their own individual place in the world at large and want to, need to do something about it.

What a nightmarish, absurd, surreal, and totally engaging mind-fuck. Anyone who's ever been trapped in the quicksand of bad life choices and desperate to find a way out will relate to Preus' work here, and the opportunities for inventive staging abound.

ONE IN THE CHAMBER is an extraordinary, heartbreaking, and unfortunately necessary work of art. Bravo, Greg Burdick.