Recommended by Michael C. O'Day

  • A FRIENDLY WAGER
    2 Jul. 2022
    The intersection of race, gender, religion, and class is a fraught place for any playwright to navigate, but Yolanda WIlkinson's dishy drama - with five friends playing a drinking game whose revelations become more and more explosive - maneuvers these choppy waters with ease and style. Don't be fooled by the short length - this is a rich feast for actresses.
  • INFERNA
    25 Jun. 2022
    We are awash in stories in this culture, told to us since childhood, with the capacity to cause incredible harm if we don't stop and examine them; it's easy for "enlightened" theatre folk to think that their stories are somehow exempt from the issues of religious stories (and vice versa). Joanna Castle Miller knows better, and her own story, by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, is an unsparing look at the myths we tell ourselves, how they can curdle into delusion, and how to bring honesty back into our lives. Vivid and visceral.
  • If nobody does remarkable things
    25 Jun. 2022
    A poetic and penetrating examination of a tragic truth - the great movements that we'll need to save this planet are dependent upon fallible, fragile, squabbling, messed-up human beings. Gibson is somehow able to find hope amidst the heartbreak, suggesting that our ability to heal ourselves and forgive each other might be the path forward for all of us.
  • The Day I Turned Into A Bird
    25 Jun. 2022
    A lyrical and melancholy meditation on one of the great paradoxes; that the very things that make us human - our intellect, our rationality, our ambitions - are the things that screw up our ability to make human connections. Vividly theatrical - each of the three roles is an actor's dream, in either human or animal form.
  • On Any Given Day in America...
    24 Jun. 2022
    In a Florida shopping mall - and what's more quintessentially American than that? - we track a cross section of our fellow citizens on what seems to be an ordinary day, until we realize that we're tracking the progress of a mass-shooter, getting ever closer to his horrific act. Spiess has pulled off the impressive feat of a play that lives up to the ambitions of its title, its howl of rage grounded in profound empathy for all its characters and a wonderful, crackerjack sense of construction.
  • Sundown Town
    24 Jun. 2022
    A heartbreaking tale of two young men coping with life in this country today, or at least not very long ago - the pandemic, the never-ending tide of racism, and the educational structures that should offer a means of correcting these ills but somehow never manage to achieve that. It's grounded in two of the most vivid, detailed, and empathetic characterizations I've seen on stage in a good long while. Beautiful.
  • see in the dark: a new myth
    23 Jun. 2022
    If things keep going the way they're going with our current civilization, then whoever comes after us is going to need some new (and hopefully better) myths of their own. Heidi Kraay's poetic and magnificently theatrical story - of a lost little girl in a vast future wasteland, with abilities that are both gifts and a terrible curse - fills that role nicely, spinning a tale of survival, of vengeance and forgiveness, of the limits of our blinkered individual mindsets and the crucial importance of community. Really marvelous.
  • Vortigern - A True Story
    7 Jun. 2022
    For those of us who love Shakespeare - and all of us English majors who identify with history's great Bardolaters just a liiiittle bit too much - Fardon's tale of William Ireland and his forgery of VORTIGERN is a romp full of historical delights. Look just below the surface, however, and you'll find an all-too-timely tale of the seductive power of deception, and how easy it is to manipulate our desire to turn our backs on objective reality, and live in the world as we wish it might be.
  • Kill Shelter
    7 Jun. 2022
    Heartbreaking, profound, and gorgeously written. Wellman has crafted a beautiful meditation on how we live with the choices we make, how even our best-intended actions can cause unimaginable pain, and the strange and paradoxical ways we can help each other through that pain.
  • A Thousand Natural Shocks
    7 Jun. 2022
    Beautiful. In the face of our culture's frighteningly cavalier attitude towards women's health and reproductive rights, Jacob Marx Rice offers this profound meditation on the joys, perils, and terrors - not simply of pregnancy, but of existence in general. Heady stuff that's grounded by a quintet of utterly lovable characters; in rooting for them, we can't help thinking life that might not be impossible after all.

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