Recommended by Toby Malone

Relationships are hard, especially when the reality doesn't exactly match up to the picture in your head. In 'Maryland', Gabby Wilson gives us a slice of life from a relationship that seems to be teetering on a knife's edge, and where all it takes is a few honest words to make it clear that everyone's on the same page. I'd love to see the rest of this play expanded out!

This is a beautifully terse play that drips with menace and a sinking feeling of inevitability as two boorish fishermen harass another camper at a secluded campsite. Rachael Carnes exactingly captures the blithe ignorance that seems to characterize so much of new American discourse, where science and conservation is meaningless against brute force and bullheadedness. Chilling work, and excellently stated.

This is so dead-on when it comes to contemporary companies trying to figure out how to tell 120-year-old play written by a Russian dead white man and making it relevant or responsive to what is important today. Katherine Gwynn takes on Chekhov and reboots over and over, experimenting with performative wokeness and skewering the gestures that stand in for actual action. This is terrific work.

It's easy to see why this play has struck such a chord with people here on NPX: it's immediately, IMMEDIATELY familiar to theatre kids (or adults who grew up as theatre kids), where the stakes are so world-endingly large and the enthusiasm for theatre and its rituals is infectious. This is a great ensemble piece, cleverly featuring only the members of a middle school drama club (all adults are off-stage) over the course of a week. Discussing the problematic nature of 'Oklahoma' amongst interpersonal drama gives this piece rich material, and the final line is killer. Great work.

Lisa is one of the most reliably intuitive playwrights I know - she takes a kernel of an idea and fearlessly interrogates it, pushing it to the nth degree. Here, a team readies themselves for the state semi-final football game, only to find out that the Varsity squad from their opponents were horribly killed days prior. Yet, coach insists they go out and demolish the grieving JV squad so he can reap the glory. Black comedy at its finest, beautifully rendered. This is a beauty.

An ethereal duologue in one of the most evocatively familiar places in 20th Century art - an Edward Hopper painting. Aly Kantor doesn't reveal too much too soon, but allows her two characters to confide their experiences so effectively that they finally merge seamlessly. There's a real joy to a piece that is self-aware as this, essentially set in a Hopper painting while looking back towards the muse that helped its creation. This is sensitive, thoughtful work.

In 'The Mirror', Joe Swenson takes a common enough private ritual - talking to the mirror - and adds in a beautiful twist when not only does the mirror talk back, but the mirror is a truth-telling representation of self. As each character speaks their doubt, fear, and self-loathing into their own faces, the Mirror calls them out and asks them to see things differently. A really interesting take on self-motivation and a nice challenge to stage.

Oh, wow. What a brilliant, fearless, hilarious piece this is. It's the kind of play you read and as you do, all the pieces start falling into place about just HOW MESSED UP Hero's situation is in "Much Ado" - and Meghan Brown doesn't shy away from a single moment of it. Here, Hero finds herself in her tragedy and becomes a complete, complex, brave woman we ache for. Her final monologue alone needs to be read by everyone. Read this. Produce it: although be warned: you'll never read "Much Ado" the same way again.

The thing I love about this short piece is what's not said. There is so much that Samantha Marchant hints at but never tells us, mixed with with brilliantly evocative language and character descriptions (Madison, dressed like the Avenue; Crystal, dressed like the gem: brilliant), which aches and yearns for a time past that is tangible but beyond reach, set in a halfway space that is an unfinished home that acts as metaphor for the place these characters find themselves in. Beautifully unsettling.

A delightful two-hander built on a great prompt: what if someone is physically unable to scream and they are confronted with a terrifying situation? In this smart scene, Alice comes home to find Dan robbing her house. Her response? "Oh." As Dan digs in more and more to Alice's physical inability to scream, the burglary is forgotten and the curiously British sense of decorum takes over. I hate to say that this would be a 'scream' to produce, but it really would.