Recommended by Jarred Corona

Is there anything more flutteringly high or heart-breaking than love? And is there anything more blinding than our own experience? With each new act, the entire world is re-contextualized. Perhaps it's because I'm a young gay guy going through a fresh and lovely and terrifying bout of love, but I felt seen in this show. My fears were spoken. My past angsts flowed. My sweetest dreams spoken. Hope blossomed and sometimes withered. How lovely to manage all that with three perspectives on thirty minutes.

My favorite author is Gillian Flynn. As a reader, I'm drawn in by her portrayals of the darkness that lurks in small towns, small communities, lurking and waiting, corrupt. As a writer, I admire her prose and how she can make the skin squirm while somehow still building sympathy for her characters. I think, if Gillian Flynn were to write a play, CATCH/RELEASE would be that play. So here's to Elisabeth Speckman and her amazing work. I hope to get to see it live one day.

As with some of the most hopeful tragedies of all time, Katie Van Zile paints a world where she already lets us in on the tragedy, and, despite knowing what will come, she gives us hope. We find hope through two people in love, just as the old couple spooning in "Titanic." We find hope in art. We find hope in drugs and jokes. We find hope in the beautifully crafted sentences and the painful fears of these characters. This is a story where pain and tragedy hurts and heals at the same time. Absolutely wonderful.

Where do we house the soul? Does it fit with God and prayer? Is it in the eyes? Is it in memory? I don't know. What I do know is that there's a hope in the helplessness of this show. There's a showcase of humanity when some of our fellows are their most demonic. How does art best preserve a soul? I don't know that, either, but I think this play has plenty of soul to gift.

As a young gay man, especially as one who grew up in a small Kentucky town, consuming LGBT media always fills me with a sort of dread, a fear of the coming violence, the tension of simply existing. Each passing line in this show builds and feasts on that tension. When the catharsis finally comes, without spoiling the ending, the escape of tension from my body was at once harrowing and uplifting. That duology alone is a worthy enough reason to spend some time with this brief, lovely play.

When we're trapped in the tragedies of our mind, time stutters, skips, and sometimes fizzles out completely. As time spirals and sputters in this play, we land in the tragic home of a family in crisis, in pain. If you or a loved one have struggled with the horrors mental health disorders can bring, you'll find something painfully familiar in this show, something that feels like being seen.

Often when we read comedies, we'll make little laugh noises, but it isn't often that we come across a line so simply brilliant that we guffaw and replay it over and over in our head. I won't give it away, but a vulture being very passionate about the information it's been given? Amazing. Not to mention, the rest of the play is a fast-paced, wonderfully absurd romp. I can't recommend this enough (NPX doesn't give me enough words). It's lovely.

Sometimes, a chance encounter is all you need to start to bring you out of the cloudy haze of your "double-dose of denial." While the characters in this short play and filled with life, its their personal feelings of having lives not fully lived in that grabs you. As they step into each other's pasts and take tentative steps to their own futures, you can't help but hope for them. And sometimes feeling hope for someone else is a mystical, magical feeling all on its own.

Don't let Capstone fool you with its hilarious riffs on everything America (even managing to make 9/11 funny whilst critiquing the cultural and corporate response to it). This is a show with goosebumps sprinkled over its true center: connection. Family. The catharsis of finally, finally being seen.

What starts as pleasantly written dialogue quickly turns existential and will leave you waiting for each new layer to peel down and reveal the tasty core of this short play. Jacquelyn Floyd-Priskorn's writing will make you wish the show goes on and on, but the final beat is the sort of delicious gut-punch that lets you know that sometimes It ends exactly where It should.