Recommended by Heather Helinsky

Sports put high demands on the physical body and spirit, and for these three young women who are attempting to make the US team, this writer brings great insights as their character is tested. Female friendship is also a fragile thing, and under the spotlight of competition, it makes for an exhilarating piece of drama. Cheering it on to production!

Theatre is a place where anything can happen, and in this apartment in Paris, Wilde is one revenging murder away from proving to God he can be angel. This is a play where reality shifts a bit every scene, but it’s well-structured so we’re aware we’re in a dream world where Lou & Sam keep waking up in their Paris sublet with something off-kilter. The clever dialogue in this play comes from the philosophic plesiosaur Loch Ness...need I say more? Someone should take a chance on this play, should be fun for the design team, memorable read.

I read this script during the development stage, and I encourage you to look at this piece, especially if you're looking for an all-female cast and realize that most theatre ticket purchasers are women. Hoke's dialogue is smart, funny, nuanced, and tense as she explores the fragility of female friendship. There are several events in this play that cause these BFFs to drift apart, and Hoke does a great job keeping multiple stories going at once. The family secret at the center is also the stuff of Greek tragedy...read & produce this!

This play, yes! This writer handles successfully and tactfully, with a great balance of light and dark, childhood and maturity, how eleven year old girls handle trauma. Her friends are a supportive circle and I also appreciate the presence of the parents in the play, and how well they are rendered. This is also an emotionally exhausting play (in all the good ways) that needs to be performed in communities. Even just on reading, it made me want to hug my dog afterwards!

Through dark humor, poetic speeches, and interesting theatricality, this writer has built a world for characters who need love and acceptance. Can a loner who likes the silence of the graveyard find love? Can a grieving mother learn to accept who her daughter truly is? And how can we ever learn to say goodbye to those we love? The living never have enough time to say what they feel, and I'm glad that even though time is fleeting, that Aubrey, Kitt, and Aubrey's mother Avery, go on this journey towards love & acceptance.

As a dramaturg who wants to see more complex plays about the disability experience getting produced, I definitely recommend this one! I love how Jason questions Robbie's use of language and has different definitions of beauty. I'm also on board whenever a play has a very specific relationship to place, excited that it's set in my hometown of Philly! There's also a lot of complicated conversations about care-taking, sibling relationships, and anxiety---great essential questions in here. I hope this play gets read, receives development opportunities, and produced soon! (Philly-based artists, read this one!)

The power of storytelling. Connection and search for a homeland. What sacrifices are made for love? What hopes and dreams can you have in the desert as an outsider? This plays interweaves stories, from Latinx myths to SE Hinton's Outsiders, as teenagers try to exist in the desert with helicopters searching for them. Haunting writing; left me with lines that still resonated with me long after I read it.

This is not a play about the Clintons, the blue dress, or anything you normally think about when you hear this name. Instead, the writer has given us a heartbreaking piece about what it means to be the "Other Woman." Monica is an Everywoman. We see her struggles, her awareness, and the different ways she's being hurt by her partner. In ten scenes, the characters are well-rendered and there's strong moment-to-moment scene work. What happens when you lose your agency over your body, your reputation, your life, and your rights? This is a painful, yet necessary feminist play.

If you're looking for an intersectional play that uses biting humor to critique academia, look no further than this fun play! This play does not hold back any punches and I encourage directors who work in universities to consider this play for their season.

I highly enjoyed this heartbreaking play about female friendship, mental illness, and honesty, told with two sets of relationships. Guilt and faith also come into the relationships, and the writer is asking all the right difficult questions.