Recommended by Marylou DiPietro

I just saw Tim Nolan's play, Stuck with Fred, in The Road Theatre Festival, and was blown away. The humanity in Nolan's play is riveting and humbling. The depth and vulnerability of the two main characters are both heartbreaking and refreshing. Stuck with Fred (the perfect title!) speaks to anyone who has had a much older friend, or a much younger friend, or any friend who understands and loves them in a way no one else can or ever will. This is a play that needs to be staged over and over.

How refreshing to read a play stripped of the temporal accoutrements that unwittingly come to define our day-to-day living. Lamedman’s play makes me think of Tennessee Williams’ dictum that he was a “poet who wrote plays” and Beckett’s unapologetic plunging into the heart of the human spirit. Bravo for letting Baldwin's poem take you to the watery depths where, as you say, you “need the pressure to feel alive” and for resurfacing with such timeless and timely treasures. Unlike poetry that fails to come alive on the page, Deluge, by its very nature, soars.

Romeo is masterful at capturing the ripple effect caused by the behavior of these four characters. We root for them because we know their flaws are ours, we understand their needs at the moment those needs are the greatest and cannot be satisfied, we feel their desperation to hold on to what they believe is owed them. We see the ties that bind us might be what tears us apart, and that losing ourselves in the forest growing up around us can be as much a blessing as a curse. This is an important play that tells all our stories.

I saw the Road Theatre's staged/filmed production of This Bitter World last night and was blown away. This epic love story reveals as much about the world we live in as it does about the two lovers whose story is told with utter grace and brutal honesty. That said, it never feels like the relationship or the story itself is a vehicle for a political diatribe. Everything about this play makes us question what we think we know about people -- especially people who, on the surface, appear to be our polar opposites.

This eerie montage of past/present, personal/impersonal, truth/denial, detachment/ intimacy is quietly gripping and deeply moving. A beautiful portrait of two life stories come alive in 6 short pages. Bravo Bryan!

Noir Hamlet is the funniest, most inventive, superbly written new play I have seen in the past five years! To say the premise and the writing are extremely clever doesn't do it justice. Noir Hamlet is everything you want from an evening of theater... and then some. I can't wait to see it again and to see any other plays John has written. Anyway who can write a play like Noir Hamlet is worth paying close attention to.