Recommended by Eric Pfeffinger

The fundamental premise for this play is bulletproof to begin with -- every potential ticketbuyer on every theater's mailing list has pets or knows someone with pets. Even if it were just a by-the-numbers "cats are like this, dogs are like that" exercise, it would be a winner. But turns out this script deftly executes the concept with twisted hilarity, philosophical complexity, and resonant humanity. Meditations on mortality/what makes life worth living, AND poop jokes? Sign me up.

There's a bruised human heart driving this memory play and it's delivered in a savvy wrapping of savagely funny barbed wire. Absolutely uncompromising in dramatizing its characters' traumas but it never feels punishing, partly because of the endlessly inventive theatricality with which it unfolds, and partly because there is absolute unmitigated joy in following these two characters and their self-amused hilarity and their love for language. And for each other.

Holy crap, what a wild ride this play is. It's like if the love child of John Waters, Charles Ludlam and Kelly Kapowski grew up and became class president at a Sunnydale High where the most popular extracurricular activities are varsity exposition and intramural subtext. The laughs are real and nonstop, the inventive staging challenges are irresistible and the cast is gonna have a ball. Would love to see this play on its weird demented feet.

This historical snapshot is thick with ugly intensity. A timeless exploration of tyranny's effects and of the costs -- and the necessity -- of resistance.

Exquisite language, effortless erudition, flawless comic rhythms, heady speculative inventions, an unexpectedly moving beating human heart and a killer title besides. Some short plays are a snapshot, others aspire to be a journey; this one's a tonal and temporal epic.