Recommended by Eric Pfeffinger

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.

This is a play built to be electric onstage with its hilarious bouts of awkwardness, expert sense of build, mounting tension and frictive chemistry. There's even a fun meta-awareness buried subtly into its central debate: is this a Christmas play or not?

A master class in comic pacing and killer timing.

Edgy and regrettably timely, this play dismantles hateful rhetoric by pushing it to the absurd extremes of its logical conclusions. A politically engaged and necessary work.

This is a COVID-era festival of funny, fraught, aching subtext, and a delicious opportunity for its two actors.