Recommended by Zach Barr

Like a clown car stuffed to bursting, BIG TIME TOPPERS is so rich with thematic weight and well-rounded characters that one performance is hardly enough to untangle its complex morals about friendship, family, destiny, and success. It achieves an incredibly deft balance, remaining realistic about the impossibility of dedicating one's life to art, while letting audiences feel just enough of the potential freedom to keep them from writing it off as madness. A dangerous and rewarding challenge of a script – not unlike juggling knives.

A haunting play about the ways we wrestle with grief, push away guilt, stew in hopelessness, and come out the other side changed for...if not the better, at least changed. Peercy's writing always remains clear to the reader while remaining hugely variable in performance.

A unique take on the Quixote myth, Bareford's script leaves me questioning the purpose of "play" – to escape the real world, or to help us better understand it? Both its comic and tragic moments are rooted in a deep empathy for the characters, and for all senior citizens, and for all who love them. An ancient story, freshly retold.

What begins as a fantastical exploration of grief grows slowly and insidiously into a heartbreaking story of how one person's trauma can ripple out into trauma for the people who love them. Like a children's fable with a dark side you never saw in your youth, Rund's play ripens with rereading, though you never stop hoping that compassion is on the next page.

As fast and unforgiving as an icy peak, Honovich's look at the violence that young women dole out to, and take from, each other slaloms excellently between a thriller and a comedy. Filled with opportunities for innovative theatricality and anchored by a trio of plush roles for anyone ages 14-40, the script is a rich blueprint that hundreds of unique productions could spin off from. Hoping for an ongoing future for this one.

An audacious deviation from the conventions of the form, "Kubrickian" is a rare work: a play that provides only answers and leaves the audience to ask the questions. A deft portrait of three characters who have been listened to far more than they've ever been heard, its an insightful look at the ways we mostly fail – and, occasionally, deftly succeed – to communicate when it matters most.

A generation's worth of anger coalesces into a blistering screed at the zero-sum games of capitalism and artistic fulfillment. Vermillion's script is a daring challenge to any company brave enough to confront it. It lays bare the secret hope of many artists: "Maybe THIS will be the work of art that fixes everything."

A fantastic Gordian knot of a play – fully-realized characters with relatable motivations, which tragically, yet understandably, put them in direct conflict with another. Is the American dream for everyone who pursues it? Or is it a zero-sum game? Nalan's deft writing leaves the question open, challenging audiences to face the answers themselves. A feast for an ensemble cast.

A globetrotting historical mystery with a motor of human grief running quietly underneath, Wheaton-Werle's play will get you thinking more critically about the forces, individual and cultural, that shape our view of history.

A play where nothing changes. A play where everything changes. The patter of Dawes characters approaches poetry in its absurdist adherences to the vestiges of a dying culture. I've never seen characters struggle so actively to avoid screaming out their existential dread, then douse that impulse with a protein shake. Brilliant.