Recommended by Eric Pfeffinger

I love the way the comic pileup of killer laugh lines in this play escalates so quickly to naked hostility, which, given the circumstances -- newborn, exhausted parents, a frigging drum -- OF COURSE IT DOES.

The laughs and builds and toppers in this play are inerrantly placed with clockwork precision right up through the curtain line, and the comedy courses along on a subtextual current of thoughtful notions about identity and destiny and the dangers of a little knowledge.

A hardcore little masterpiece of theatrical metaphor. Each line leaves you hungry to hear the next, with countless opportunities for a performer to unearth layers of humor and poignance.

I love this brisk, nervy, unpredictable play and the way it both refurbishes and eviscerates The Crucible all at the same time.

Beguiling and galvanizing, word-drunk and riveting, Where We Stand seems to strip the very mode of theater to its barest constitutive parts to spin a timeless fable about justice and human frailty, taking full advantage of the three-dimensional immediacy of live performance in a way that both engages and implicates the audience.

Not so much slice-of-life as a series of slices; lay them end to end with all their fleeting slights and pleasantries, and before you know it you're watching a nuanced portrait of life in all its fullness.

It's got the velocity of a killer comedy vignette, the metaphorical fecundity of Kafka's weirdest dreams, and the heart of a great romantic comedy. All in three pages. Teach me your ways.

Profound and affecting: an unsentimental yet tender story of humans fumbling toward growth, set in an all-too-vivid historical moment when everyone was plagued with fear and fatalism and a terror of interpersonal contact.

Every moment in this play vibrates with an urgent momentum, with the heedlessness of youth and also with its paralyzing insecurities. The playwright knows how people talk and the play conveys how these people feel and the whole thing's so alive it almost demands to be staged.

This absurd and knowing comedy is unexpectedly one of the most plausible representations of post-apocalyptic human interactions that I've seen. And its vision of post-apocalyptic theater is uncomfortably evocative of pre-apocalyptic theater.