Recommended by Matt Minnicino

In the pantheon of "plays about burgeoning womanhood," Serena's always feel so sublimely structured, playing with form in a delicate dance that more accurately reflects the fractured, unsatisfying, wandering, wistful, even dangerous pace of adolescence. I saw a reading of this play ages ago and many of its striking moments of quiet, fraught with awkwardness and sadness and risk and pain, lingered in my heart for years after. Less a thesis and more an anthology of big concepts distilled into moments of excruciating intimacy -- and a boon to any ensemble of actors.

I was recommended this play years ago and it shot right up to being one of my favorite texts I've never seen -- a brutal/tender collision of epic and intimate, a future-oriented explosion of the Western genre into its most human parts then carefully reconstructed into a wide-ranging ensemble drama dripping with magic, character, grit, and yearning. This is one of those plays you'd write sign ten petitions and call your congressman to see performed. A script that really soars.

Elly Irwin never created a character she didn't love. She respects and cares for each one, acknowledging the jubilance of their daily lives, honoring that they are flawed and capable of anything, at all times careful to evoke their personalities and upbringings and deep-rooted beliefs in every throwaway line and interaction. She creates textured worlds that feel more slice-of-life than any slice-of-life playwright who came before, and this play is no exception. Often painful as you see where it's going, but never manipulative or melodramatic: a play about people and situations and what we take from them.

Read this play years ago and it wafts into my mind every now and then, like a sublime ghost floating in the deep reaches of space or the sterile white rooms of lonely ship. The dynamic between the characters is that perfect fusion of tender and terrifying, as you're never sure whose hurt will reveal itself and how, if they'll come together or destroy themselves or each other in some small or large way. The space exploration of Keichel's work is the galactic depth of heart rather than the stars, but that's hard enough. Can't wait to see it someday.

There's always that point in a playwright's early/"emerging" career where they write about themselves in some way and we should all be thankful Andy did it this way and not any other, mashing together a potent, existential slurry of nerd lore, theatre magic, identity, and sizzling anticapitalism presented in a way that actually makes sense to the uninitiated. I really really hate to say something like this but I have to: these were exactly the droids I was looking for (wrong trilogy, I know).

Saw this play long ago and it stuck in my bones in a lot of delicious ways, especially as the world fractures off its axis a little more each day. A deeply tender but never saccharine/deeply terrifying but never cheaply shocking study of community and isolation in the face of mostly-inevitable oblivion. Jack's ear for character and structure is so attuned, and the way he dances around loving awareness of scifi tropes to create his own decaying, refracting arc for the story is thrilling.

I feel like the terms "tour de force role" or "bravura part" get thrown around a bit but this play really epitomizes the concept, a pair of actresses take on the world, each other, memory, truth, and just a dollop of prescient geo-politics in this riotous and, ultimately, carefully-wrought study of friendship and what it means to actually, actually, no like ACTUALLY know another person. Plus: great part for a puppet.

This play captures the chaos of being young and sexy and flawless and gross and understands that all those things added together equal armagaddon -- maybe in a way even Boccaccio didn't. I'm delighted and horrified by the sublime care taken in every intentional typo, or the torturous consumption of sweet sweet ice cream and how many things for which it's a potent metaphor. More classical adaptations like this, that tear the original apart and have sex with the pieces.

I read a review of Scorsese's "The Irishman" which said something to the effect of "the reason Scorsese made this movie was to make it so no one has to make any more gangster films" -- I feel this way about Sofya's play and its loving/scathing indictment of a certain kind of apocalyptic masculinity, desperate and needy and hollow and perfectly-realized. I don't really need other plays about men because this one gets the job done.

The quietness of this play speaks volumes. On the surface a parable for immigration, Andrew's play swells and grows into a grand, elegiac poem about connection, loss, family, fear, freedom, blame, and ultimately humanity. Its world is crafted with the utmost artistry, every smell and sight and sound popping off the page -- fitting in a play that is so much about the places we call home, places we try to make home, and memories of home we carry with us.