Recommended by Eric Pfeffinger

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.

A terrific, ingenious, raw and poetic play that encapsulates a sprawling and vitriolic political divide as a grounded, human drama between two specific, recognizable people. Covers vast rhetorical and dramatic territory in just eleven pages.

What a masterful juggling act this play performs -- a keenly observed character comedy, an uncompromising interrogation of morality on a global scale, and a kick-ass rock & roll concert -- all in the service of exploring and ratifying the power of art to make a difference in the world. Knocks your socks off in performance.

The playwright boldly and deftly uses the extremity of her protagonist's crises to create amplified moments that are both absurdly hilarious and completely grounded in real, recognizably painful humanity. It's a broadly funny comedy with high personal stakes and it never telegraphs what it's going to do next -- the playwright's confident manipulation of tone fills me with envy and admiration. In performance it must be a rollicking gutpunch of a ride.

Such a strikingly affecting play -- bold and clear-eyed about adults coping with the consequences of their choices in a world of very real obstacles. Nothing in this play feels contrived or manipulated, and yet its seemingly relaxed plotting resolves into a tightly observed treatment of regret and accountability. Terrific, surprising, believable characters that actors will love to play.