Recommended by Vince Gatton

Holy forking crap, that’s drama: the stakes, the excitement, the obstacles, the conflicting needs and agendas, the ugliness, the hopes, the fears, the drive-by flashes of exposition, the painful truth of it all - all in a few short minutes in a small trailer home. Edge of your seat stuff from DC Cathro, that satisfies on its own and leave you itching to know more.

You needn't be a lefty (as I am) for this dark allegory to hit. In telling the Kafka-esque story of a man on death row for being left-handed, Christopher Soucy bounces breezily from absurdist comedy to political satire to outright horror, eliciting chuckles on one page and chills the next. (Especially notable is the character of an eccentric fellow prisoner, whose litany of ridiculously over-the-top crimes is hilarious...right up until it's not.) A wild ride, and a warning.

If drama lies in characters making choices with high stakes, then John Minigan has certainly captured it here. Is teen Angela overreacting, making an impetuous, emotional choice based on irrational fear? Or are she and her friends making an entirely reasonable, clear-eyed assessment of the dangers and risks they face? And which values will her mother hold strongest to in making her own choice? A nauseatingly relevant drama for our times.

Quirky, funny, sweet, and sad, Adam Richter's This Short Life juggles wildly different tones with confidence and makes the absolute most out of the discord. A reluctant vampire, the ghost of Emily Dickinson, and a Christian museum guard come together in a clash of outlooks, needs, and moods, punctuated by raucous physical comedy. It's like "Scooby-Doo" with a mournful sigh (and a welcome shout-out to one of the greatest New Yorker pieces of all time). Delightful.

I love a good time loop story, and this one's a corker: a woman's one-night stand turns out to be the hinge point to which two of her future selves return. Big ideas about free will, destiny, the butterfly effect, and just plain road-not-taken life choices are anchored here by snappy dialogue and delightfully unfussy characters. A brainteaser with heart.

Complicated, sexy, and terrifying, Goat Blood takes its audience down dark paths, constantly shifting what you're afraid of (or who), who you're afraid for, and why. The present-day scenes and flashbacks feed each other cunningly, and the pacing remains tight throughout; meanwhile the various tensions - life-or-death, sure, but also cultural and sexual - will keep you leaning in all the way to end. An unsettling winner.

It's about the taking of photographs.

Steve Martin's MACRO slows down and beautifully creates for us a portrait in oddly-suspended time, expertly leaving spare but effective clues to what's happening outside its frame.

It's about the taking of photographs, sure.

It's also about how we try to control and bend time in the face of the dreaded inevitable.

It's about fear, and coping, and focus, and clarity, and breath, and memory.

But, sure.

It's also about the taking of photographs.

Holocaust narratives based on real-life survivors' stories can present a number of challenges for playwrights, but Blevins masterfully keeps her eye on the prize here, avoiding all the traps and taking us on a deeply moving, often funny, and thrillingly imaginative theatrical journey through the heart of darkness, asking deep moral questions in a place where morality itself feels like a luxury. Clever magical-realism devices and some thoughtful character doubling help shape Gisella Perl's story into something grippingly watchable, timeless, timely, and relevant. This is how you do it, folks. Brava.

If you were ever a fan of Pinky and The Brain, you will adore Evelyn and Benjy, two small children intent on breaking into their mom’s laptop to discover the secrets of adulthood. Evelyn in particular is a comic gem, a hyper-precocious genius with criminal mastermind instincts, trapped in a six-year-old body; her interplay with weary little brother/minion Benjy recalls classic comic pairings like Abbott and Costello. The intensity of focus, almost-right deductive reasoning, and witty sibling interplay are tremendous fun. Read and enjoy.

David Hilder's dialogue sparkles, his characters reliably witty and intelligent -- which only makes the fear and heartbreak sharper as these beautifully-drawn people grapple with dark forces assembling around and inside them. Hilder's time-hopping and structural sleight-of-hand mix a love story that breathes genuine intimacy, with a harrowing family drama of obligation and frustration, with a destabilizing existential nightmare that might spell the end of everything. A page-turner, and one that actors and directors will champ at the bit to dive into.