Recommended by Michael C. O'Day

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.

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.

On the surface, this is a nice, well-constructed, twisted little dark comedy. But if you've ever been stuck behind a long suburban grocery line, if you've ever shrieked your lungs out while stuck in highway traffic - because every minute stolen from you was being diverted from the great and important things you JUST KNEW you'd otherwise be doing - then you'll understand the darker fears and fantasies Mandryk is playing with here, in gloriously cathartic fashion.

There's a moment in Caryl Churchill's TOP GIRLS - a moment of disturbing intimacy between two young girls, a moment of shared adolescent anxieties and frustrations and bodily fluids, and you know exactly what moment I'm talking about if you know the play - that's over in an instant, as if it's too much even for Churchill to confront. That's where Kelsey Sullivan STARTS - for her, there's no such thing as too much, and STINKY GIRLS is a giddy, demented, ferocious blast of id from one of our most fearless young playwrights.

Here's the thing: if you grew up a nerdy child in America and you lived to tell the tale, then nothing about our present, frightening political moment is the least bit surprising - the impulse towards fascism is just the bullying instinct writ large. Sickles knows this truth in his bones, and he's used it as the foundation of MARIANAS TRENCH - a magnificent melange of science-fiction epic, coming-of-age story, immigrant saga, queer romance, political satire, and possibly (gods I hope not) prophesy. A spectacular achievement.

The problem with recommending this play, and saying that it's got one of the all-time great jump scares, is that it's selling the piece short. CASSIE STRICKLAND is also a masterful depiction of American masculinity, gun culture, small-town dynamics, and survivor guilt, and to say one more word about Gatton's accomplishment is to rob it of its sinister power. (But yeah, it's got one of the all-time great jump scares.)

A zippy mash-up of Moliere and "The Ethical Slut," Blevins' piece works beautifully not just because of its cleverness - though its plotting and rhyme schemes are clever as hell - but because the play's construction reflects and amplifies its theme. The rules of a farce in rhymed couplets are as strict and byzantine as the rules of a polyamorous unit, after all, but in both cases those rules only barely contain the roiling human passions contained therein. Delightful fun for good, giving, and game actors.

Does it feel that the average American, in their chaotic and diffident response to the environmental crises we're facing, has a proverbial devil and angel perched on either shoulder whispering in their ear? It certainly does to Feriend, who has the perceptive acumen to make the devil a space alien and the "average American" worried he's there for a probe and convinced that Chinese weather balloons are somehow involved. A delightfully mordant piece of satire.

A deeply affecting and urgent piece of work. Williams is dealing with a number of sensitive topics here - fracking and its environmental cost, yes, but also the realities of raising a child on the autistic spectrum and the ways economics and class complicate our lives - and any one of them could go awry in the wrong hands. But Williams' hands are absolutely the right ones; he balances everything with sure and steady construction, true empathy, and builds to a gut-wrenching (but weirdly hopeful) conclusion.

A sweet, wistful pas-de-deux of adolescent love (or love-adjacent feelings, at any rate - adolescence is complicated) that also features some of the biggest belly laughs I've seen on stage in a good long while. Burke's is a wonderfully specific voice, alive to nuances not only of race and sexuality, but of how each generation finds new ways to tell the same timeless story.