Recommended by Christopher Soucy

Beautiful, well constructed, a tour de force of storytelling. Amazing roles, inspired parallels of injustice, and top notch theatricality. It is also infuriating. The kind of infuriating that stories like these deserve. They need to be told. We need to be outraged. Emily McClain has crafted an amazing art history lesson/dynamic tale of the continued mistreatment of women. I distinctly remember seeing the titular painting in Florence when I was a child and being amazed by its brutality. McClain has done Gentileschi and her art a great service in this tale.

A triumph of wit. Worthy of Oscar Wilde. The language is crisp, clever, and precise. The story is compelling, humorous, and pitch perfect. Reading this play was as effortless as sitting and watching a fully realized production of it. The characters are executed so thoroughly and meaningfully that you don’t need an ounce of imagination to give them life, it is all there on the page.

At the heart of this adaptation is an absolutely brilliant double casting (even more brilliant explaining it as single casting). Like truly inspired. Monica Cross has provided a Shakespeare fanatic such as myself a wonderful new lease on a favorite play. My delight in the new nuances to be explored cannot be fully expressed. Huzzah!

This play is both hard to read and impossible to put down. Vince Gatton beautifully navigates the chaos and trauma of an all too familiar tragedy. Haunting and revelatory, YOU HAVE EARNED BONUS STARS is a tour de force of theatricality. I strongly recommend reading it and even more strongly advocate producing it.

So many of our fairy tales, parables, myths involve eating. Hansel and Gretel, Goldilocks, Persephone. Here is an amazing break down of recovery from eating disorders set against a back drop of the stories we consume. Aly Kantor serves up a a stellar two hander that would be amazing for any performer to present and any company to produce.

This play checks all the boxes! Funny, dramatic, scary, steeped in mysticism and mystery! Jewish vampire demon for the win! A great chilling piece of radio drama!

Never forget the reason for the season is high sales volume. This quirky holiday treat is a pitch perfect look at the commercialization of the holidays. Philip Middleton Williams captures what it must be like to plot and plan the ad campaigns that inundated the air waves the moment there is a hint of cool in the air.

A powerful metaphor or an actual cage that holds a heart? This beautiful gem of a play explores the fantasies that consume us when we are in pain. The very notion of “keeping it together” or keeping a broken heart whole through copious amounts of pressure just add to the familiar tragedy that this play exposes so well. Cross is a masterful playwright with an incredible talent for endearing you to her characters and their plights quickly and totally.

It’s not everyday you read something and question whether it is a tragedy or not. There is certainly a tragedy at work, but ultimately there is a warmth in this piece that leaves you with a hopeful note within a funeral dirge. I am a bonafide Sickles fan, a sicklesfant if you will, and I can say that this play continues my streak of loving his work.

Santa embroiled in a court room drama? Well, A very funny court room drama. Christopher Plumridge brings his usual expert touch to a fantastic premise. Enjoyable through and through, a true Christmastime treat!