Recommended by Eric Pfeffinger

There are three great comic roles in this smart, funny play with a pitch-black heart.

If you've got a male-heavy ensemble with tight comic timing and a way with a laugh line, this brisk and loopy short should bring the house down.

Lively and exuberant -- a play about publishing and posterity, about minutiae and dealmaking, that keeps its most famous character offstage and yet manages to be a rollicking high-stakes life-and-death drama about striving to recognize and preserve something fundamental about humanity itself.

A refreshingly grown-up play that regards youth with a gimlet eye and middle age with knowing regrets. To call something a memory play risks making it sound inert and backwards-looking, its stakes in the past; but this play demonstrates that the past is relentlessly present, shaping the current moment with merciless urgency. Keenly felt and resonant.

This very human, deeply felt period piece -- about same-sex love in the face of bigotry and self-doubt in 1930s Wisconsin -- is partly a moving reflection on how tough things used to be, but also a sly warning that the roots of intolerance still run deep.

Stories about characters who neurotically cocoon themselves against the contagion of the outside world are nothing new, but this play does an absorbing job of mapping that idea onto relatable family dynamics with dramatic tension and pitch-black humor.

This play's preoccupation with violence against women makes it eternally timely; the erotic agency it assigns its characters makes it thrillingly complicated; the audacious theatricality of its imaginative fantasia makes it dizzying. The language is fantastic, the opportunities it offers for theatrical design are copious, and the play's implications are chewy and provocative. The main difference between Red Riding Hood and other girls is that Red only had one wolf to worry about.

I don't know if this satisfyingly diverting short play has enjoyed a bump in popularity since David Bowie's passing, but it deserves attention: an appealingly quirky collision of personalities, more idiosyncratic than its unapologetically high concept suggests. Especially producible if your company includes a young male actor with an ethereally sexy charm.

This is impeccably written comedy; the play may seem deceptively unassuming in its modest scope and Aristotelian unities, but the rhythms and pacing of the dialogue are expertly deployed with ruthless precision. Two great roles offer actors the welcome combination of great laugh lines and unexpected depths.

Perpetually timely, and such an involving and engaging plunge into a fully realized community... well-made and organic all at the same time.