Recommended by Vince Gatton

If you can get through this bananapants raising-from-the-dead high school comedy without squealing with laughter, you are made of sterner stuff than I. Lisa Dellagiarino Feriend's dialogue is both effervescently witty and outrageously bonkers, her plot utterly ridiculous yet entirely rational to her characters, who manage to seem utterly unhinged and exceedingly rational at the same time. Comedy gold, right here. Actors and audiences will have the time of their lives.

Don't let the sun-kissed orchard setting fool you: Apple Season hits hard. The past is very much present for these three no-longer-young people, whose story slips back and forth through time as they struggle to reconcile the traumas and secrets of their pasts with the choices they must now make about their futures. The harshest of its revelations are nicely softened by a tremendous amount of love among these characters, and the warming effect of E. M. Lewis's earthy yet lovely prose. Brava.

In Case of Bruising is a wildly charming play about wildly dark circumstances. A trio of triplets play, scrap, and ask big questions while avoiding a home life defined by neglect, instability, and abuse. Kamila Boga creates a satisfying friction between the playfulness of her characters and the grim realities that mark their lives, using a fun structure to tell a story about how we manage pain -- with mechanisms that sometimes serve us, and sometimes very much don't. A deeply affecting piece.

Don't even read the blurb or the keywords, just know that when Greg Mandryk steps outside of his comfort zone into writing tender family drama, magic happens. On this quiet, picturesque beachfront porch, a mother and daughter make magic happen. I will leave it at that. You're welcome.

Hilarious, deranged, tense as hell, with great bantery dialogue, an opening that captivated my Gen X heart, and a truly unnerving ending. Also: how can anyone not remember Simon & Simon? Suspicious.

A big, chewy, old-school father-and-son drama that hearkens satisfyingly back to Arthur Miller or Eugene O'Neill, told in its own contemporary Black voice and laced with gothic horror. Sex, sax, and specters haunt this angry and anguished tragedy of toxic manhood, with epic clashes played out in dialogue that sings like opera. Ken Love has a big voice, and damn if he's not gonna use it.

A father-daughter drama with a fantasy premise, grounded in the mundane particulars of a lifetime's worth of everyday moments. This play is witty, warm, and full of love, with a satisfying structure that fans of David Mitchell's CLOUD ATLAS will appreciate.

I absolutely love this play. Elizabeth A.M. Keel has given us gifts with these three spiky characters and their brutal, brutally funny, and surprising interactions. (Young Izzy in particular is an absolute gem, and I want to protect her at all costs.) Give your casting pool and audiences a treat and program this short immediately.

As a catastrophist, I am always on edge waiting for the other shoe to drop, in life and in stories. What a delight to be so thoroughly disappointed in that regard by Matthew Weaver, whose TUNA BOY carries ominous rumblings of the world outside, sure, but within its walls delivers unchecked enthusiasm, unpunished decency, and unabashed embrace of community where I'd least expected to find it: among teenagers in a lunchroom. The kids, it seems, are alright.

A dystopian portrait of slowly boiling frogs, semi-content in their little pot. As for what's going on in the world outside, Craig Houk lets us see but through a glass darkly; we glean just enough to know it's bad, and that worse is yet to come. A claustrophobic and devastating indictment of complacency in the face of ruin.