Recommended by Michael C. O'Day

  • After the War is Over
    13 Mar. 2024
    What seems at first like a wistful two-hander about negotiating love and attraction in a bygone era turns out to be two two-handers, inextricably and heartbreakingly linked, about the inevitabilites of age. The brilliance of Jolly's piece is that its theatrical form is itself the perfect metaphor for the persistence of love and dignity as memory falters. A sweet, sad little gem.
  • Jill and Jack
    8 Mar. 2024
    There's a lot of pieces which offer the "true story" behind some nursery rhyme or other; what's remarkable, and delightful, about Probst's piece is the sheer amount of ground it covers, and the many variations she's able to achieve on the premise. Gender roles, fear of failure, personal destiny and hydrogeology - Probst addresses all of these as easily and gently as...well, as a nursery rhyme. Enjoy!
  • The Gift of BS
    7 Mar. 2024
    It's been a good long while since I've felt a play quite as viscerally as THE GIFT OF BS - and I daresay you'll feel much the same regardless of wherever you happen to fall on any given spectrum. Osmundsen casts a penetrating eye on issues others wouldn't dare even notice - not only the disorientation of a mid-life diagnosis, and the difficulties of interacting with the neurotypical world, but the toxic competition that can occur between neurodiverse individuals with varying levels of "functionality" - and crafts a story that's equal parts searing and hopeful. Magnificent.
  • FireMother
    29 Feb. 2024
    An astonishing, poetic meditation on living with grief. Hunter is compassionate but absolutely uncompromising, and she pushes this piece into unsettling, gobsmacking insights: the ways that loss can render us unrecognizable to ourselves and our loved ones, the horrifying likelihood that hurt of this magnitude is liable to become our new normal - if that wasn't the things have always been already. Magnificent work.
  • The Eighth Circle
    22 Feb. 2024
    A delightful, poetic, and weirdly heartwarming take on Dante, as a corrupt politician and his complicit wife wind up exactly where they're meant to wind up. If that's all this was, it would be a perfectly satisfying and stylish entertainment - but the hereafter winds up being a journey of discovery for these two, and Portman has some insightful and pointed things to say about the resentments we carry with us and the strength it takes to reclaim our (after)lives. A tremendous amount of fun.
  • HERO DOGBERRY
    21 Feb. 2024
    Interlocking seamlessly with its source play, this companion piece to/feminist interrogation of MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING is that rarest of things - Shakespearean criticism that's rooted in genuine love of the Bard and appreciation for how his plays actually work. Cross gets everything right - the niceties of when characters speak verse and when they speak prose, the sly improvisations around the metrical pulse, the implacable logic behind the malaproprisms - and her tale of Hero getting herself out of the plight the Bard put her in is a gorgeous, heartfelt complement to the original.
  • Pardoned
    19 Feb. 2024
    A marvelously sneaky one-act, this wistful period piece - about the Obama daughters steeling themselves to face one of the most ridiculous rituals of the modern presidency - is about much more than it seems at first glance. And it is most emphatically a period piece; as the daughters deal with a social media landscape that scrutinizes them constantly, and with a level of vitriol rising by the second, Barr captures the dawn of a mindset soon to catastrophically engulf our culture, and how tragically ill-prepared we were to deal with it. Lovely work.
  • Prewritten
    9 Feb. 2024
    Every obscene tragedy we hear about - and we hear about so terribly many - befalls ordinary people doing ordinary things, trying - like the sweet and marvelously realized couple at the center of PREWRITTEN - to eke out a bit of love as they live their lives before their lives are interrupted. That's the truth at the heart of Moughon's ghost story, in which our real world is the horror and the ghost is the love we cling to in the face of it. Beautifully done.
  • Shmoofy-Floofy Heaven Ball
    19 Jan. 2024
    It's strange, even surreal, that American culture offers two principal ways to spend Sundays - peaceful worship of a loving God, and a profoundly violent game of ground acquisition played with an oblong ball. Thankfully, Franke has a keen grasp of the strange and the surreal, and a marvelous sense of comedic escalation, and she takes this tale of angels inventing the Lord's favorite pastime to gleefully absurd, possibly apocalyptic levels. Delightful.
  • THE MASTER'S TOOLS
    14 Jan. 2024
    Zora Howard is up to something quite radical in THE MASTER'S TOOLS, her play about the historical figure Tituba, far more so than simply retelling "The Crucible" from the slave's point of view. There's nary a Puritan to be had, and the story Tituba does tell us - in mesmerizing fashion - focuses on the tragedy of her mother instead. Except she keeps retelling it, with new and astonishing variations each time, until it becomes clear that this story does not belong to one woman at all, but is instead a harrowing ancestral cry of despair. Terrific theater.

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