Recommended by Franky D. Gonzalez

Second Death of a Mad Wife lives up to its genre billing as a dark comedy. Bringing together an unreliable narrator and an unreliable listener, Kelly McBurnette-Andronicos creates a ghost story that leaves you questioning what's truth, what's fiction, what's madness, and what's gaslighting. Just as you feel you're coming to a kind of understanding, you're thrown another curveball in this wild ride in the most unexpectedly lush setting you could find for someone living in a squalid shack. Second Death of a Mad Wife is both unique and a delight for those who love the unusual and macbre.

Go Down, Moses by Dana Leslie Goldstein is a political work that asks us to really examine the hard facts of taking a stand and holding true to your beliefs. The play may be set in 1985, but it is as relevant to us now more than ever as we come to difficult questions about our ideals and tolerance for free speech. This play makes us examine where we are going and to really think about what strange bedfellows we may get when we protest/support something controversial. It's a play where you'll be debating long after reading or seeing.

Maximillian Gill has achieved something difficult with The Mimosa War. Gill's created a balancing act of a play where we get a hilarious lampooning of Mahattanites, a sobering look at what civil wars eventually devolve into, a dystopian nightmare, a look at race and religion in the context of survival and expectation, a pointed critique/challenge of individuals who claim to hold a certain belief and quickly abandon them for the notion of safety, and a love story--both platonic and romantic. It's a balancing act that needs to be read--or better yet seen in production--to be believed. Marvelous work!

David Caudle's A THOUSAND CRANES is that unique play that strikes the balance of making both a searing socio-political play and a poetic human dram. You find yourself flying through the pages trying to get to the next moment. You think long after you've finished reading the play and go back to lines that struck and continue to strike deep chords in you. It's a play that has to be read and experienced. I hope it finds a beautiful life onstage and that people can witness A Thousand Cranes for themselves. A wonderful play!

THE ABUELAS by Stephanie Alison Walker is heartbreaking, funny, true, arresting and uplifting. It's a play that will take you on a journey that ties what seem like disparate threads together into a tapestry that serves as a reminder that the cruelty of tyrants and brutal regimes live long past their passing. Paired with THE MADRES, Walker has created works that highlight the invisible tragedies that are too often forgotten or overlooked by history and the public imagination and forces us to remember. A marvelous work, both a tribute to those forgotten and an immediate, relevant work of theatre.

There are plays that impress. There are even plays that shock you. Heroes of the Fourth Turning did both and something much more. It left me awed. I almost couldn't move from my seat in the theatre. Then buying and reading this play that outlined the evolution of conservatism from Goldwater to Bannon was like receiving something deeply true. Arbery has created a play that does not patronize nor seek to turn its subject matter into cartoon parodies like we see from so many other plays about conservatives. It's a play that won't leave you. I can't recommend it enough.

Moral: This is what happens when you take your loved one to New Jersey for your anniversary.

Sylvia is in the right and I stand with her.

I return often to the power of this play and its many complex layers. An absolute marvel to behold, BARS AND MEASURES finds astounding ways to critique so many facets of our deeply flawed culture while still telling a heartrending tale of two brothers bound by music but separated by so many distances both physical and metaphorical. Idris Goodwin is a master at his craft, using music, dialogue, and social ills to show us the depth of emotion one goes through in the journey of life. It's a marvelous play. Read it and let the music wash over you.

There is much to admire in Straton's ENFERMA. His unique and inventive way of communicating exposition, his creation of distinct voices through his effective command of dialogue, his use of plot twists without it feeling contrived, down to his ability to touch on cultural problems and virtues in our society without being preachy. This play is relentlessly readable and human. His characters are complex, full-fledged human beings with complicated moralities, weaknesses, and inner-humanity that explores our reaction to crises of both self-created and bodily. A play to watch out for. I hope it has a long life on stage.

Jaymes Sanchez is an artist who takes folklore and returns it to its origins. He creates monsters onstage and forces his characters and audiences to see that monsters are the manifestations of the soul. It's our heritage, our guilt, our grief, our unique selves. In The Cucuy Will Find You we go on a journey of self-reckoning and understanding. In so many ways this play is a family drama, and in so many other ways it becomes your own story where your Cucuy lurks waiting to devour you whole. A beautiful, funny, painful, and revelatory play.