Recommended by Eric Pfeffinger

Everything about this play is ingenious: its brevity mirrors that of the abusive behavior it dramatizes, with a similarly lingering impact. The staging possibilities are extensive and tantalizing, giving an ingenious director much to work with and the audience a lot to work through.

It's an eloquent and heart-rending exploration of tactics for dealing with loss and trauma, and the role of art in enabling or hindering recovery. But it's also a thorny, absorbing, and often very funny story about four brave and damaged women, two of whom just happen to be goats.

The logline "Richard III in high school" sounds like a gimmick, but instead it's an inspired springboard that launches a compulsively watchable story of adolescent toxicity -- relatable, heartbreaking, and funnier than any mainstream teen comedy movie. This play knows both how to land a joke and how to bring you up short with an unexpected revelation of character depths.

I don't know if this is the first digital videoconferencing play in theatrical history, but it's deft and lively and a hoot. The play masterfully deploys the rhythms and glitches of online conversation to tell the story of low-level officials using their fear of the present moment to justify all manner of dysfunction in a low-stakes, high-tension civic negotiation. An ingenious accommodation of theater's current logistical challenges.

Hard-boiled, red-nosed, big-shoed. A relentlessly delightful exercise in funny and fanciful absurdity that's anchored in attentive worldbuilding and characters drawn with real integrity and surprisingly deep-rooted pain.

Brilliant -- up-to-the-minute in its response to the circumstances of today, timeless in its dramatization of the anxieties that accompany human connection, physical and otherwise.

A bracing and clear-eyed dramatization of humanity's willingness to succumb to its ugliest fears. How hard it is for us to address a perceived threat when it's a virulent microbe, how easy it is for us to eliminate it when it's another human being.

It's a challenge to be heartbreaking, unflinchingly candid, and uproariously funny all in the same play, but I swear this one achieves all three sometimes within a single moment. Yes, it's personal and achingly honest, but it's also flawlessly structured storytelling that delivers a whole lifetime of characters and struggles and triumphs in a single impossibly evocative ninety minute show. Anyone who's been a parent -- or had a parent -- will feel both seen and understood.

This play is a perverse and delightful pleasure, boasting boundless opportunities for physical comedy and two of the unlikeliest and most surprising protagonists imaginable. The deft tonal blend of effervescent positivity with sociopathic morbidity energizes this improbably sunny tale of striving and triumph and bedsheets.

Nostalgic high-school hangout narratives are usually the domain of the movies, and this engaging play's multi-character multi-location structure has a superficially cinematic feel. But in production it's a fundamentally theatrical experience -- breathing the same air as these characters, you feel immersed in the concrete minutiae of their world. The tight, brisk script is both packed with incident and also somehow leisurely; it feels age-appropriate that teen romance, PTSD, getting high, and school shootings are all assigned roughly the same emotional weight.