Recommended by Eric Pfeffinger

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.

Ingenious and mercilessly funny. A rollicking black comedy that, like its characters, seems to be making up its own rules as it goes. You laugh so you don't cry.

Unrelentingly brilliant. Feels like it was written 5 minutes from now. It's like Beckett but funnier, and more gutting, and somehow both despairing and hopeful at the same time. An immediate and incandescent portrait of our nightmarish now.

I love this kind of play: characters who are smart and screwed-up, dialogue that's stuffed with ideas, a story that smuggles life-changing stakes into seemingly idle chatter. The fact that the characters all inhabit a brand of conservative spirituality that never gets dramatized in today's American theater makes it all the more compelling. Urgently contemporary and eloquently timeless.

Such a brilliant use of theatrical conventions to enact how, even at our most despairing and alone, we're inextricably intertwined with other humans. Driven by the playwright's ear for language, this is an unsparing exploration of darkness and connection and the perils of honesty, leavened by laugh-out-loud humor and concrete particularity and, ultimately, hard-earned optimism.

This play is such a sly and lively entertainment it's a playwriting masterclass -- effortlessly accessible in its universality yet durably rooted in geographic specificity. You're so compelled in the moment by the choices and fortunes of these engagingly multidimensional characters (and the surprising ways in which your feelings about them shift the more you learn), you may not even notice the thorny and uncompromising themes this play's exploring until after the curtain falls on its pitch-perfect ending.

A sharply funny satire about power and governance with more than a few contemporary resonances. It also packs some welcome surprises: all the characters -- the feckless leader, the manipulative conniver, the cynical fixer -- reveal by play's end an achingly relatable humanity under their fatal flaws.