Recommended by Vince Gatton

I thought I knew where this was going, and was delightfully surprised to be wrong. Philip Middleton Williams' "two unemployed men" prove to be far more notable and significant than his droll understatement suggests, and what follows is a hard-earned lesson in history, reckoning, and the choices we make after we lose. A sly piece of work.

There's "eccentric" - the safely, adorably quirky that nonetheless colors within the lines - and then there's ECCENTRIC, the all-caps version that chases its own strange muse and doesn't worry itself whether you're following where it's going or not. John Patrick Bray is playing delightfully in the latter mode here -- and still ends up in an eccentrically adorable place. Underneath the wonderful oddball-ness is a tender, lovely story about identity, love, and grace. Bravo.

Jacquelyn Floyd-Priskorn understand that in art and life, the best way to deal with heavy situations is with generous doses of acid humor. The situation these women are facing is no fun at all: the grinding, slow decay of their father and husband from dementia. But their sharp familial wit serves as a lifeline and anchor as they each process the loss (and the labor it requires) with sharp squeezes of lemon, avoiding mawkishness and letting genuine feeling sneak in through the snark. Lovely.

Suspensful from the jump, and deeply unsettling to the very end - mostly because Weaver’s commitment to confounding expectations never wavers. Our brains want to make real-world sense of this abstract scenario, and assign meaning and motives and expected behaviors based on all the other suspense stories we’ve seen…but Weaver has a firm hand on the story he’s telling, and it’s its own, strange beast. This one lingers.

Knuckles’ timing is spectacularly terrible, but sometimes you just have to listen to your heart. And write poetry. A delightfully sweet cartoon of a rom-com, with the fine-tuned mechanics of a Swiss watch.

Autobiographical writing is a risk - emotionally, artistically, you name it - especially about personal history as painful as this. But Paul Braverman, well, braves it out beautifully in his ERSTWHILE. He shapes the story commandingly, without losing his way; and the difficult subject matter is leavened with nice spurts of humor, and softened by time and hard-earned wisdom.

Three older men -- one lovably cranky, one lovably eccentric, one lovably steady -- learn to navigate their new normal. They're a little further down the road than I am, but even from my phase of life, Mathew Green's depiction of the accommodations, efforts, frictions, and quiet kindnesses of long-term friendships rings true. A funny, lovely examination of how our longest-held bonds serve us as our circumstances inevitably, inexorably change.

Absolute holiday magic. Read it and have your heart grow three sizes, I sweartagod. I need to stop typing lest a spoiler slip through, but trust that this is every bit as hilarious and deranged as you may have come to expect, and hope for, from a Lisa Dellagiarino Feriend play. Reader, I HOWLED.

There is tremendous delicacy here, as well as steely strength, borne of necessity. The resentments, the walls, the anger, the secrecy, and above all: the yearning! So much exquisite truth and pain and disappointment and hope, packed into this deliciously agonizing period piece. I don’t know whether I want more, more, more…or the sweet, awful sadness of not knowing what will become of them next. Gorgeously done.

An absolutely brain-scrambling premise, executed with breathtaking dexterity and depth of feeling. Daniel Prillaman’s instinct for suspense, pacing, twists, and revelations is unmatched, and he’s firing on all cylinders here.

Baffling, surprising, and ultimately very, very satisfying. Take a deep breath. Press Play. Dive in.