Recommended by Matt Minnicino

Walden is one of those rare plays that is both cosmically huge and refreshingly small at once, displaying an easy-going complexity of ideas and relationships that invest you deeply in both its world and its characters. The central bond, between two sisters who can't leave each other's orbit but are lightyears apart, is riveting and funny and sad and visceral and a whole lot of other adjectives that render them sink-your-teeth-in roles for any pair of actresses. And the story swirling around them, of how we move on from the world or save it, is (pun intended) totally stellar.

Golly I like this play! We don't get a lot of Love Stories that are content to be Love Stories, plays whose conflict is not buttressed by genre cliches but instead driven simply by the restless, sad, yearning hearts of its characters. The Resurrectionist is not the least bit ashamed of its black-comic absurdity and monster-movie tropes, but deeply invests those elements with heart and soul. This is a play about wanting someone to reach out and touch, realized with tons of brisk humor and quiet, careful intimacy. A balm for the nerdy, needy, loving soul.

There is a delicacy to this play that is so exquisite -- structurally it feels like watching the lifespan of a flower, first blossoming, then wilting, but then a new bloom emerging. Brisé finds with ease and grace the intimate details which populate our memory, how we take those for granted, how much it would hurt to lose them. But hardly a doom-and-gloom piece, Ian's play is a remarkably hopeful carpe diem of a story, exhorting and exulting and exciting its audience to hold onto both the things we love and the things we have a hard time loving.

Amy's plays are a genre-smashing kaleidoscope of tone and form and character and this strange brilliant rave/fever-dream is no exception. It was my pleasure to be witness to its evolution, and I can't recommend it enough. It's jam-packed with perfectly-executed contradictions: joyous morbidity, shallow depths, magical postmodernism -- all while skewering traditional storytelling and plunging us deep into an exciting, scary cyber-pantheon of gods and snakes and everything else you could imagine.

After a reading of this play, I was drunk on the world Jessica creates to sustain the considerable radius of her ideas, themes, the empathy she has for her characters. This story creates a community in its audience, swept along in a narrative that manages to be an education, a ghost story, a history lesson, a family drama, a generational parable, and a sneakily raucous comedy when it wants to be. It's drawn sensitively but without sentiment, magically without being twee or oblique. It's a miraculous thing and I'm thrilled to see it widely produced, as it surely will be.

A remarkable, visceral reclamation of fable. I adore this play, in its effortless tightrope-walking between the language of fairy tale and sensitively-managed, fully-felt themes of female anger, trauma, violence, and the choices we make to sustain, protect, or empower ourselves in a world that gives no outlet to do any of those things. I can't wait to see Katherine's spell cast on audiences -- magic with a tremendous capacity to heal through the examination of past and pain and to give ferocious voice to those struggling to find theirs.

I can't wait for this play to storm the ramparts of modern theatre -- it's just one piece of evidence of Celine's particular brand of genius, but it's a deeper dive (pun intended) into the impossible task of self-examination that all artists wade through, done without the usual helpings of narcissism or self-absorption. Instead, it's delicious and delirious and full of fun, fantasy, longing, and more meta than you could throw a stick at (in the best possible ways). Celine skewers the genre of "playwrights who write about themselves" and, at the same time, makes the world her oyster.

This play still sits with me after seeing it in a little one-off reading years ago -- a sci-fi slice of life that poignantly milks the tropes of the genre into a tender and funny relationship parable, delightful and deep just long enough to feel its moment is earned when it decides to strum the strings of the heart and the head. I'd happily see this a staple of one-act festivals nationwide.

Allond(R)a is irresistible - it aches and swells with the wonderful bawdy humor, outsize joy, and sunlit heartbreak of small lives and loves in the big city. Gina is one of the great empathy experts of the theatre, loving her characters in a way that makes them full-hearted and nuanced in their every sunny, sad, soulful, or searing interaction. Allond(R)a does for Brooklyn what Wim Wenders does for Berlin or what Trainspotting does for down-and-out Edinburgh -- glorifies its sweaty, silly, wayward, wonderful heart.