Recommended by Eric Pfeffinger

This short play is a master class: breathlessly funny, effortlessly ingratiating, the script's surgical skill with a punch line drives the story inexorably into darker themes about toxic mentorship and sexualized workplace coercion, wrapping up with a deftly engineered conclusion that's redemptive and encouraging without being pat.

This play is a wild ride, grounded in its thematic concerns but unfettered in its imagination. Each turn it takes is one you didn't expect, and Clementine's free-associative, self-interrupting, increasingly desperate pitch to an imaginary Hollywood executive is virtuosic and hilarious and unhinged and alarmingly relatable.

Art imitating life commenting on art: a thoughtful and character-centric exploration of how the art society values speaks volumes about which human beings it values.

Yes, it’s intense — complicated, flawed, and recognizable characters embroiled in a twisty, brainy story about justice, integrity, loss and redemption. But IN COMMON also finds unexpected opportunities for humor in its completely absorbing and dimensional storytelling. By the time it ends (“Already?” you think) you feel like there are five new people in your life.

Bold and ingenious, angry and surprising. Opportunities for inventive and balletic theatricality coexist with gripping scenes of menace. And in its most audacious gambit, the play's violation of conventional dramaturgical expectations enacts a resonant critique of a metastasizing social crisis. Regrettably, this play gets more urgently relevant with every passing day.

Savagely funny if you're steeped in the American Girl-verse but the play connects even if you're not, clearly laying out the terrain of that world even as it dismantles it. And it's not about that anyway: it's about compromised good intentions and commodified values and self-worth and self-doubt and solidarity gone sideways. All wrapped up in a structure with surprising sharp turns and the ingenious design challenges of a few ambitious stage directions.

Pulls off the difficult trick of combining scathing satire with an earnest sense of hope -- ergo, probably exactly the kind of story we need right now. The foibles of recognizable characters collide within an ingeniously hilarious dystopian framework, dramatizing a vision of the future so immediate and plausible that it might all come true before the curtain call. Abundant staging possibilities and richly comical opportunities for four funny actors make this a must-read.

Envy the actors who get to deliver this high-level banter and breathe lunatic life into these unpredictable characters.

A cunning and affecting koan of a play, as slight as a child's improvisatory flight of fancy, as weighty as a world's worth of hopes and doubts, as fleeting as childhood itself.

Brisk and brainy: big ideas wrapped in mercilessly entertaining theatrical storytelling. Like Stoppard if he had an appointment he needed to get to soon. Each role is a gift to its actor.