Recommended by Eric Pfeffinger

Instantly absorbing, ruthlessly smart, mordantly funny, brilliantly verbal, uncompromising in its refusal to moralize. A vibrant collision of Shakespeare and this morning's culture-war headlines.

It's easy to love this show for its heart and honesty and emotional resonance. But don't overlook what a smart and gifted craftsman Franky is. The story is ingeniously and unshakably structured. And while some one-person shows can threaten to slide into an inert wall of prose, this is indisputably and fundamentally theatrical; it's propulsively written for three dimensions in real time, building the audience's presence and reactions into its rhythms and dynamics. Plus, it's relentlessly hilarious when it isn't being heart-rending -- and sometimes even when it is.

Between this collection's casual erudition, offbeat humor and ruthless sense of economy, the most obvious point of comparison is David Ives. But I think I may actually prefer Mark's execution of the short-form anthology: it's warmer, more ingenious, and it holds together with the kind of unified eclecticism that binds together the best short story collections. I'd love this play even more if I weren't so mad that I didn't write it.

This play is a nonstop delight -- clever and wise and insightful and just really freaking funny, with inerrant comic rhythms and a barreling momentum that keeps the appalling behavior displayed by the producer characters digestibly hilarious. Warning: if you're a playwright, watching this storyline could cause ulcers.

It's a grounded relationship drama, except when it's brainy speculative sci-fi, except when it's deft verbal comedy, except when it's chilling technohorror. A smart and urgent play with tantalizing design possibilities and some visceral moments that really make me want to see it fully staged.

400 years of American history powerfully delivered in one brief minute.

A worthy entry in the venerable tradition of big-sprawling-domestic-dysfunction plays where stubborn problematic things in a family's past collide irreversibly with the present. The dialogue is good, and the rhythm of its tones is effective, and for all the enormity of its seriousness of purpose it's also funny in all the right places.

The playwright knows how to write a joke, and every minute brings a new laugh. If that were all Save Hamlet! did, it would be more than enough. But by empowering its secondary characters to undermine and derail the source material the play also raises questions about authority, and literary conventions, and political power, and gender dynamics. Verily 'tis a hoot and a half.

A show with tremendous theatrical energy and anger and hilarity -- a fever dream of a play whose promiscuously imaginative inventions collapse the distance between Martha Washington's moral myopia and America's sins of today. The endlessly unfolding possibilities of this script are a gift to a talented cast and design team.

Sometimes genre is a straitjacket, but for "Hookman" the crazed slasher motif is a springboard -- to an endlessly surprising mixture of dream logic, urban legend, coming-of-age anxieties, dark deadpan comedy, and blood-drenched grand guignol that's somehow both generationally anchored in contemporary youth culture and timelessly relatable.