Recommended by Jarred Corona

From snappy, terrible-pun-filled dialogue and incisive conversation to great dances of imagination that engage wholly with the medium of theatre and its ability for transformation, Fields has crafted an amazing one act that, given the state of the America at the moment, is more important than ever. Coming out as anything is complicated and stressful, but finding our ways to our true selves, transmuting friends into family, it, like this show, brings magic. Very well done.

Adorable all the way through. I definitely think there needs to be more kissing on stages everywhere, desire and love playing out in front of an audience. Who knows if this relationship will last, but for a moment it was precious. And it's good to be reminded of the existence of beauty.

Life, love, sexuality, and murder all have at least two things in common: they're complicated and messy. These characters are bound up together in dirty knots, sticking them together and causing both levity and sickness. And there's one thing Mackling is clear on: the deranged lengths we'll go to in order to achieve closure can cause untold damages as we try to move forward. But hopefully, when we get a glimpse of it, we can start to do better and heal the harms done to and by us.

The Good Place holds a very special place in my heart. It makes me laugh and feel good, and it makes me violently, violently sad in a peaceful way. I definitely saw the influences of that show in Fenton's own, but with the very end, with that very last sentence, he truly lived up to the inspiration. No Exit's dive into how we derive meaning is tackled with the same exceptionality here, and it has all the fun of Knives Out. The movies scenes add a new level of fun for the actors. I hope many successes come for AAH.

Pancakes do have this terrible tendency: they're delicious and smell great, but sometimes, when you're finished eating, they leave you with a terrible, terrible sadness. When we remember it, do we remember those first fluffy bites, the anticipation of the batter in the pan, or do we mostly remember the pain? Do we wonder what it could have been if we built it into a full cake, covered in sweetness and icing and fruit?
Cabana Boy shows us a pancake. It's delicious and funny and sweet. Then it hurts our stomachs. But then, at the very end, the aftertaste.... Brava.

The title isn't the only clever way this collection of shorts and monologues are arranged. Baker carefully crafts the order for moments of levity and hope to break up the pain and tragedy. Of course, it's that same lightness that makes the coming tragedies strike even harder. My favorite pieces would be "What Happened This Time?" and "Guilt by Association," the former of which serves as a light and funny midpoint and the latter which ties it all together, combining the tragic with hope, almost using that hope as both a dessert and a punch. An excellent collection

When I finished reading this piece, after a moment, a certain sadness hit me, and I can't quite place it. This isn't a sad show by any means. It's a pleasant moment of a boy slowly coming-of-age, of asserting himself and being scared of how others view him. He has his passions and he just wants to love and talk about them. Already he feels the burden of expectation. The expectations of masculinity, of sports, of heteronormativity. And we see here at least some of the burden lift. And maybe that lift is what brought the melancholy. To see hope.

Towards the middle of reading this, I started cackling. And the smile never left my face. This is wonderful. And MacDermott follows in one of my favorite playwrighting traditions of letting his jokes pour through into his stage directions, adding extra comedy for any readers who might not be watching and going to the hospital with bruised diaphragms. Sexiness is holy, and blasphemy is sexy. So at a certain level of sexy, blasphemy must turn holy, right? Well, with these priests around these statues, there're plenty of holes to choose from (sorry). Absolutely hilarious. Amen.

In our struggling searches to protect those we love, we all do harm. We harm ourselves, our loved ones, and those unrelated. Fear drives us. It harms us, and yet it sometimes saves us. Love is a powerful force. A beautiful one. A terrifying one. Hel is the only one who can truly know the haunting of the dead, and yet, she is the only one who can see the true beauty of existence and humanity. She, harmed by the world and all those around her, is the only one who can trust in death and a better future. Brilliant.

This show is such silly fun, but, to be honest, I think my favorite part is the joke at the end. It ties everything together wonderfully. I laughed. I'm smiling as I write this recommendation. The way the characters speak and interact, the world they inhabit, everything is so thoroughly absurd and fantastic, both in the genre sense and in the giving-praise sense. While I think an audience will have a good time watching this show, I imagine it'd be even more of a treat for the actors who truly get to play with the ridiculousness.