Recommended by Ryan Stevens

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.

A fascinating re-examination of who has a right to history and the long shadow cast by institutional prejudice. Espinoza comes at these issues from all angles, leaving no room to hide from her insights and imagination. This is an endlessly important story to tell and one that deserves to be heard far and wide.

A fantastic, atmospheric, expressionistic story on family, music, American culture, and the bonds that hold people together and hold them down at the same time. This play is thrilling in how it focuses this story in tragic characters and tangible emotion that sears off the page.

'Where The Lovelight Gleams' is a wildly imaginative story that never loses sight of its beating heart. The emotion and sincerity flow right off the page and into your mind as we see these three nuanced and achingly human characters pressed against a world literally falling apart. Poetic, sensational, timely, and grounded, this is the type of work the American theatre needs.