Recommended by Abraham Johnson

Dark, dangerous, sharp, and just scandalous enough to keep us on our toes, I adore this monstrous play. The twins are fascinating in their toxic, razor's edge intimacy. Cleo's relationship with gender dysphoria is refreshing, subtle, and expertly buried underneath the scandal of the chatroom scenes. Those chatroom scenes, too, feel at once dangerous and dramaturgically thrilling. Jesus, I'll be thinking about this play for a while. Excellent, excellent, excellent.

A gorgeous and inventive play that brings its language, character contexts, and visual poetry to a truly decadent level. I was breathless by the ending. This play wrestles with the tangled relationships of history, trauma, and family as we follow Birdie on her path to both honesty and autonomy. What a dark, special, sure-footed script. It would be a delight to see this onstage!

This play has such delightful surrealism threading through each of the scenes, counterbalanced by the fingerprints of capitalism that reflect on every surface. So smart! A theatrical, nuanced, and human take on how a group of characters on the poverty line reach and stumble toward the promise of better lives.

This play. This PLAY! Vivid, gutsy, hilarious, dangerous, cerebral, and theatrical to the max, smart producers should jump at the chance to premiere this script. Coby's razor-sharp craft and rich dramaturgy are expertly buried underneath the bubbly theatrical worlds that the characters move through. The character dynamics, too, are studies in the brutal civility with which America's history of eugenics is (not) discussed. The power struggles between these women are SO visceral and SO immediate, and watching them unravel (especially in the 1820s Connecticut scene... I scream!!!!!!) is a horrific delight. I'll be thinking about this play for years.

A gorgeously crafted play that is at once intimate and massive. I am in love with *all* of this script, but I especially love how subtly the environment takes on its own character, plot, and pseudo-speech. We are always aware of its flames, and that danger is such a brilliant and natural way to learn about the 3 incarcerated women at the forefront of the play. I especially appreciate the way that McCloskey never spoon-feeds us any platitudes, instead trusting the audience to sit in this purgatory and make what we will of the beautiful, horrible cinders. What a play!

Maddie is a master of writing characters who are at once desperate for change and terrified of it. That
duality creates beautiful, subtle tension in this play where campers are torn between the idyllic versions of who they were at camp, now grown into adults still chasing self-improvement. The world of this play is such a delight to rest into. Wry, subtle, surreal, and so refreshing, this is a quick-paced read that would shine on a larger stage or be an awesome script for college-aged-groups looking to produce new voices.

I saw this play back in the 2020 Writing is Live Festival and 2 years later I'm still thinking about it. Heartbreaking, hilarious, brutal, campy, and fun. Watching Abilene and Clementine wrestle with the world around them until they turn towards each other? Wow. What's even more impressive is how much tension in this play is driven from a place of love-- violent love, absolutely-- but love that paints the world of the play with colors and textures that feel wholly unique. I don't know any other plays like this. I love this script dearly.

Omniscient Barbara Walters, disembodied hands, and the hanging cloud of Corporate Sponsorships swirl together in this delightfully theatrical exploration of what it means to deconstruct and reconstruct a kitchen. Or a body. Or a family. Everything (!!!) in this play crackles. The dialogue rides a hilarious but sharp line as newscasters joke about putting Skyler down "like a deer." The tension of Skyler's injury permeates every scene–– testing her physical limits and the family's optimism. Striking images of anonymous hands poke and prod Skyler through kitchen construction, physical therapy and into a new (though delicate) comeback. I love this play!

Oh my god this play. Simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming, "An American Animal" features exciting theatricality, dynamic characters with refreshing humanity, timely themes of American isolation and fear, and genuinely funny/intimate dialogue against a massive Yellowstone landscape. The YA-summer-romance plotline is told with clarity and heart, refreshingly balanced alongside the just-as-swoonworthy nurturing of the wolfpack that Paz, Chloe, and Willa are tracking. This play is so, so special and the ending feels like a gorgeous, queer expansion into the people that the summer allowed Chloe and Willa to become. Beautiful! Can't wait to see this produced!

AH! The balance of pain and humor in this play is surgical. At once, FULLERTON feels like... a California ghost story about the places we leave? But also a love letter to the way that absence drives us to make beauty for ourselves? And also that sensation of when it’s the end of the Prom night, and everybody’s smiling and sweaty, but on the drive home all of the possibilities of the night start dimming into reality? Wow??? Read it, produce it, please and thank you <3