Recommended by Aly Kantor

You're in for a twisty ride full of compelling reversals in this spooky, well-structured tale about the costs of neglecting your responsibilities! Loaded with witty comedy and depraved horror, this dark yet goofy piece keeps you on your toes, laughing and gasping in turn! The underlying folklore of the world is deep and compelling, creating a sense of rich history that leads to high and rising stakes. This play is perfect for a deep-winter chuckle or adding light to your spooky season! Bravo!

This spooky, ambient play works on many levels, showing us an incel's perspective on the world and allowing us the spooky, gleeful pleasure of watching his own deeply flawed worldview fall to pieces. The horrific imagery in the piece is rich, handing designers the license to craft a harrowing world full of menacing wax figurines and dark, moving shadows. I love the weight of the silences and the power of stillness and how they work together to build an unsettling experience! Creepy fun!

This play brought to mind videos of expectant parents sobbing in disappointment at their own "gender reveal" parties. However, this witty piece delivers a moral about what it means to be a parent through two funny, flawed individuals who actively grapple with decisions that could literally transform a human's life. Brilliantly, Busser helps the audience fall in love with the titular, hypothetical Taylor, making the stakes (and the breathtaking reversal) feel high and well-earned. Phenomenal!

I love a story that can successfully humanize a monster, and this play does so with natural dialogue and huge laughs! Though it's unquestionably a comedy, it does ask some interesting questions and make some thought-provoking observations about the resilience of humans and their role in bringing on the inevitable apocalypse. I loved the pop culture references, especially to popular zombie media! A really fun choice for spooky season!

Oh, this is silly, ridiculous fun! Just when you think you've reached the peak of goofy, action-movie absurdity, things escalate! It's fast-paced, with incredibly flawed but earnest & lovable characters! Plus, there are awesome opportunities for a fight choreographer (with a sense of humor!) to have a field day! In the end, this comedic joyride does ask compelling questions: how much do you have to know about someone to love them, and what's the difference between a hero and a villain? So fun!

Being an ambitious teenager is hard—part of you despises the very peers whose attention you crave most. In this play, the Queen Bee kicks the bucket—relief!—and then comes back wrong. The depictions of the power shifts are masterful here, and I love the specific, messy, shameless characters. How many of the choices we make are genuine vs performative? I love the exploration of how behavior haunts us. A fascinating, theatrical play teen girls (and many adults) would benefit from experiencing!

There are fractured fairytales, and then there's 'What You Wish For,' which smashes its source material to indistinguishable, hilarious, sexy (???), profoundly depressing smithereens! It's a story of double standards and lowered standards, in which all happiness and satisfaction come at a high and rising cost. Is it sad? Is it hilarious? YES! It moves like the wind, from climax-to-literal-climax, taking the audience on a depressing workplace journey that will keep them cackling despite it all!

This classic-yet-contemporary farce is a whole-body cringe of a play, and I loved every hilarious, agonizing—and unfortunately relatable—second of it! It's packed with delightfully quirky, recognizable characters with clear and compelling points of view. I love the central friendship so, so much. From page one, this play is loaded with fantastic sight gags and a brilliant comedic sensibility that will absolutely keep an audience laughing. The bottom line? Farce is not dead! "Odd" is a gem!

I am a sucker for a romantic comedy, and the weirder the premise, the better. This twisted kidnapping-turned meetcute ticked my every box. I loved the direct-address monologues and the slow creep toward vulnerability which, against all odds, made me enjoy getting to know some truly deplorable characters. Everyone is super weird but fascinatingly complex, veering between humanity and inhumanity line by line. The ending was a well-earned sucker punch - the best kind of 'surprising but inevitable!'

When I read wonderfully bizarre, thoroughly imaginative, viscerally disturbing, and utterly impossible plays like this one, it inspires me to be just a little bit braver. What a wild, totally unpredictable ride through a brilliant theatrical, consistently hilarious, unexpectedly logical (???) world! There are so many incredible stage images that will stick with me for a long time! Also, I feel like I learned a lot about what happens at typical strip clubs.