Recommended by Vince Gatton

An excellent vehicle for young actors and a nice riff on being the new kid, Places also takes a metatheatrical turn that ends up being more than just a gimmick. Andrew Martineau gives us a solid metaphor for displacement and belonging, wrapped in a highly entertaining short package.

Imaginative, moving, and often weirdly fun, Void is a tense and rewarding two-hander featuring two compelling young women. The story is infused with dark magic and folklore, but the play is grounded by disarmingly down-to-earth dialogue and acerbic humor. The cat-and-mouse between these two young women, one of whom thinks they’re strangers and the other who knows they’re not, yields to a deeply-felt family drama at the play’s heart. Playful and sad, intimate and spectacular, magical and mundane, Katelynn Kenney has stirred together something really satisfying here.

I always love it when a play is not about what the characters think it’s about, and such is the case in Debbie Lamedman’s The Incident. A comic-ish mystery-ish about confronting a scary neighbor over a suspected crime — which turns out to be both less and much more than anyone thinks — this sly little play is more revealing about the characters and their relationship dynamics than some of them ever realize. Great fun on several levels.

I love this play so much. Sara Farrington captures these 9-year-olds in all their imaginative glory without ever condescending: Sage and Mickey are such fun, but also complicated, full humans, their lives increasingly shaped by the messy off-stage adult dramas they can only see through a glass darkly. Their joys, thrills, and terrors bond them to us, and to each other, in ways that are funny, painful, and ultimately deeply moving. Such good stuff.

Oh, this haunting and haunted little play! An unsettling examination of the lingering effects of trauma, this short piece gives you so much to chew on — about community, isolation, violence, and connection — and features a sequence of incredibly compelling non-verbal storytelling that left me breathless. Scary, sad, and wearily kind, this is my kind of thriller, packing its short run time with dread, chills, and moral weight. Excellent.

A group of middle school detective-fiction aficionados throw a Halloween party — and things go terribly wrong. Having some, uh...experience with adolescent nerd-dom, I can testify that Daniel Prillaman’s dialogue, with its mix of precocious hyper-verbosity and dopey inarticulateness, rings painfully, charmingly true. He also gives us an ensemble of lovable characters, zingy wit, a compelling little mystery, and a winning conclusion. A total charmer for young actors, and audiences of any age.

A dazzling “What the fuck?” of a play. Starting with a sense of dread and dropping unsettling oddities that accumulate in delicious and ominous ways, The Lights Are On is a tight 90 minutes that unfold with the logic of a nightmare. Are we in a psychological horror movie? An Albee drama? An apocalyptic environmental disaster story? I’d say all of the above. With three compelling but deeply untrustworthy characters, this is a play where no one is safe — meaning for themselves or for the audience. Practically demands a second read.

For fans of the musical Gypsy, Fable can read as an irresistibly dishy behind-the-scenes making-of piece, as two legendary sisters battle over whose version of the truth will be remembered. But that reading would only scratch the surface of the highly theatrical and deeply personal exploration of memory, ambition, fact, and fiction Doug DeVita has given us here. The stagecraft imaginatively and expertly underlines the artifice, authenticity, and relentless effort that go into defining one’s life and legacy. “We’re all liars”, their mother tells them, and boy, does that ring true.

Effectively creeptastic and so much more, this solo journey of a city mouse into the heart of darkness is at once a thrilling adventure, a hilarious fish-out-of-water tale, a wry critique of our relationship to work, and an absolutely terrifying horror show. As a fan of disaster movies, horror movies, campfire storytelling, self-deprecating comedy, and terrific endings, I found this little play to be an absolute winner. I want to see it, I want to perform it, I want to watch others experience it. Excellent.

Oh, Jesus. What a goddamn time to be alive, when this romantic tear-jerker of a monologue could be one of the million stories happening all around us. With great restraint, Keyes matter-of-factly earns his quietly devastating payoffs, and makes you want to pull your person in tight — or at least wrap yourself in a warm blanket. Dang.