Recommended by Maximillian Gill

A wonderful meditation on love, life, and letting go. The dialogue is sharp and direct yet also amazingly expressive and perceptive about the inner emotional states of the characters. In less confident hands the mixing of characters in the “living” world and those in the world “beyond” could easily get muddled, but Frandsen keeps everything clear and visual so that the reader is never confused. The dramatic flow is tight, never an ounce of fat or a wasted line. The resolution is completely earned. Impressive work overall.

A really fun short play! Using the embodiment of death as a character is irresistible for any writer (or maybe it's just me), but Busser’s portrayal is unique for making Death into a purveyor of dad jokes who is simultaneously a terrible customer service client because of course it's never easy to deal with death. I can see this piece being really funny onstage.

One of the many things I love about Malakhow's work is his deep sensitivity for characters at peak vulnerability, and his gift really shows through in this piece. The writer conveys the anxieties of those suffering from eating disorder with honesty and deep empathy. Their difficulties around what are everyday situations for most people are detailed and utterly convincing; the piece so completely captures the world from their eyes that we cannot help but feel for them. The perfume scene is intoxicating and sensual. I look forward to seeing how the play develops as Malakhow continues working on it.

Our favorite characters from the first part of the trilogy yet again form the spine of the play, and we delight in their mature perspectives and touching re-acquaintance. This time the story takes in both the political events of this richly imagined future and the impending collapse of our ecosystem. Sickles fills the outwardly sterile Antarctica environment with wonderfully lively characters and lots of sexy science talk. The characters are removed from some catastrophes even as they witness others firsthand, and we watch breathlessly over their shoulders, completely engaged thanks to Sickles’s always assured writing.

Gacinski doesn’t hold back in this rough portrayal of a relationship bound by co-dependency, creativity, and abuse. The play’s clear-eyed rendering of the male character depicts how his philosophical stances on art and drug use progress towards brutal violence in a chilling portrait of the manipulative methods of toxic masculinity. Tough and compelling.

McBurnette-Andronicos’s thrilling play has a lot to say about how our current political situation can be traced through the country’s history. Her portrait of a town with a normalized KKK presence is chilling and effortlessly convincing. Yet again, I have to remark on the writer’s incredible feel for language in the dialogue. How she is able to convey the rhythms and peculiarities of American English from a century ago is beyond me. The use of antiquated slang always feels authentic, yet the characters are so real I never feel like I’m reading a period piece.

Imagine something like a film noir set in the world of theatre and playwrights, complete with double-crossings and lovers with suspicious agendas. Now imagine it with Gacinski’s unique style and you have an engaging play that takes some unexpected twists and turns and keeps you wondering until the very end. Also an apt metaphor for how creativity both fulfills and depletes an artist spiritually. We've all been there!

Oh wow! A compact, brutal tale. No spoilers, but just when I thought I knew where it was going it instead ended up someplace unexpected, dangerous, and mythic. Just perfect in melding content to theme. I won’t say any more, just read it.

Busser’s satirical wit is particularly sharp in this short play. The piece skewers corporate cage match culture with some extremely apt bathroom-related metaphors and lets us know in no uncertain terms that big business’s only tangible contribution is waste for others to clean up. Also, you may think you’re climbing up the ladder, but at the end of the day you’re just standing there awkwardly holding a more powerful person’s ****.

I love dystopian stories, and I fully enjoyed the intrigue, the details of the totalitarian nation, and the world-building of a distressingly plausible future, but what caught me off guard was how compelling I found the two protagonists and their relationship. Both are struggling in different ways but both are real and richly imagined characters. The conceit of using letters to illuminate their relationship and the oppression of the state is clever and extremely effective. So now it looks like I’m in for the whole trilogy!