Recommended by Ryan Stevens

Last Waltz captures the poetic longing of a dream, with painfully clear humanity and a beautiful sense of time and space. Mahrer is like an impressionist painter, letting character movements and solitary moments fill the space in vibrant night colors. This play is so beautiful and so gentle with its heartbreaking quality. It will stay in your mind.

A vicious, incisive, and timely farce about the dissolution of hope in the face of raised voices. Imagine if South Park had any kind of moral fortitude while still holding onto a razor-sharp sense of humor. McCloskey dresses down the perceived integrity of the American town in just under an hour, and his wit and urge to say what needs to be said bleeds through the page. A vibrant runaway train that encapsulates the worth of short, to-the-point, theatre.

Walden succeeds in high-concept speculative fiction and as an intimate look at living in a time of crisis. With an unshakeable emotional core and three crystal-clear, fully realized characters, Berryman plumbs the depths of emotional exploration in family and in a culture hurtling towards ruin. Produce this play while there's still time and world to produce it in!

A human, aching, intimate look at a mind in a moment of crisis. Mahrer has such a gentle insight that this play's true depth sneaks up on you, coaxing you into Sarah's point of view like a glove slipping onto your hand. This is a story about art and artists that doesn't preach or pat itself on the back, but takes a hard look at what it means to be in charge of one's own happiness.

An extremely smart, genre-savvy radio play! This inventive noir tale takes the historical backdrop of its genre and heightens it, making escapist fantasy into something timely, nuanced, and extremely entertaining. I'd listen to a whole series of this story with so much style and atmosphere.

This is the kind of play that sticks in your head for days and makes you furious you didn't find it sooner. A magical look at the forces in our world that might themselves be yearning for more, and the fundamental way that empathy and emotion can change the world, wyrd is a romantic, heartbreaking, and overall thrilling theatrical achievement that dares to make the abject nature of reality and the mortifying ordeal of being known into one of the most layered scripts in recent memory.

Magical realism that bleeds off the stage and into your heart. These terribly human characters working through tragedies and losses big and small make their pain make so much sense, and Rowland navigates this fraught landscape of self-destruction, grief, and the pain of being known with absolute ease. This is a play that makes emotional storytelling look so easy -- and that's not an easy feat.

Beautiful and striking in its composition, Refuge combines painterly landscapes and brutal depictions of the struggles for survival at the border, creating an achingly human story that offers no easy answers or empty optimism, but still succeeds in soaring into sublime emotional peaks and valleys. It's theatrical in the best sense of the word, and the kind of immediate, important and imaginative storytelling the American theatre needs more of to evolve.

This play accomplishes the herculean task of tackling the issue of gun violence from a unique and insightful angle. No hand-wringing or pearl clutching here, just an inventive, deviously satirical appraisal of how we adapt to our society when the most obvious way of adapting just can't happen. This is pitch black comedy that is entertaining even as it's unsettling, long after you've reached the ending.

A pure and open-handed look at a single soul under incredible duress, Brisé is an extremely human story beautifully and theatrically told. August is pulling at some truly terrifying concepts of the loss of self, fear of dying, personal identity, family secrets, and the agony of being known here, but the existential terror never overtakes the yearning and humanity of the story's single actor. A delicate balance of heartbreak and hope.