Recommended by Sam Heyman

Phillip Middleton Williams has done it again. Cabana Boy captures the engrossing, carried-away-with-the-current quality of first love beautifully, crafting a relatable protagonist you feel for, even as life and love deals him a challenging hand. The play uses its tight cast well, managing to build a world believably with four roles and a handful of referenced supporting players. I’d relish the chance to see this staged!

When you read a play and you can just feel the joy the playwright -- or playwrights -- must have felt while writing, you know that you're in for quite the treat. Stuffed to the gills with song lyrics -- always spoken, never sung -- (A Day in) The Life of Pie is an ambitiously referential, comic-noir play that will have you smiling and laughing all along the way. I hope someone takes a chance on Pie and brings it to life on stage soon!

If it squawks like a chicken and it scratches like a chicken...

Camp Wonder transports you into the bizarre, fascinating dystopia of the Feather Federation of States, full of slogans, mottos, groupthink and at least the whisper of Resistance. Vicki Meagher's characters navigate the mind numbing manipulations of living under a totalitarian regime and self-splitting challenge of trying to live with integrity in such a world. Uncanny, haunting, but altogether convincing, Camp Wonder is truly a wonder.

To lose a child you thought you knew, and to learn something that you must learn to reconcile without them, is a pain greater than many of us can imagine. Bruce Karp does an excellent job exploring the grief of his play's central characters, understanding that closure takes time and past understandings require processing to disentangle. Poignant and theatrical, "15 Seconds" navigates difficult emotional territory with careful nuance.

The simplicity of WOMEN AND MONEY as a title belies the rich, comic texture of this Kafkaesque comedy from Jerry Slaff. A family of two grapples with becoming a family of three, if only for the promise of a cash reward, and the story that unfolds is filled with verbal and physical slapstick and acerbic wit aplenty. Slaff’s characters come off the page, all of them roughed up by life, clinging to what sweetness they can still taste—or to the bitterness they’re used to. An excellent three-hander.

Aly Kantor's lovely opposites-attract one-act, Any Port in a Storm, puts two strangers between a hurricane and a storm of their own making. We don't quite get the full 36 Questions, but over the course of the play, Hector and Paige become vulnerable with each other in delightful and unexpected ways. True love can take time, but chemistry just needs a bit of a spark -- and boy, do those sparks fly. What a terrifying situation, what a beautiful play.

Some plays build tension by wrapping their narrative around a concise period of time, but few of them accomplish the feats of scope and lived-in intimacy as Jennifer Maisel manages with EIGHT NIGHTS. Set over over half a century's worth of Hanukkah evenings, this play engages meaningfully with the impact of generational trauma, the persistent fear of all survivors that the nightmare they survived may return again, and the importance -- and difficulty -- of telling one's story. EIGHT NIGHTS is an impressively structured, heartwrenching triumph.

I stumbled upon Emmy and Magical Girl Play on Twitter and via The Tank’s 2022 reading, and I’m so glad that I did! Magical Girl Play is a charming, thoughtful and nuanced tale of balancing adulthood challenges and mystical destiny. Kuperschmid engages with what it means to be good — and speaks powerfully to the difference between darkness and evil. An enchanting work destined for greatness!

Blending the contemporary with a lesser known but exhaustively researched historical love, “Company of Man” is a feat of queer docudrama and slowburn romance. Readers familiar with Cowles’ prior draft will relish revisiting these endearing friends-to-lovers while also marveling at the play’s new layers of resonance, which render this already timely narrative into a timeless classic. This play’s finale will bring audiences to their feet, and more than a few among the crowd to tears.

An unexpectedly endearing union of temperaments yields hilarious results in Tristen Canfield's "The Window" -- the sardonic, dry deliveries of the Cat are met with Sherman the Fish's repetitious, but no less charming observations and forgetfulness, and somehow it all just works. If this arrangement were one's entire existence, one might be a bit morose, but for audiences and readers, "The Window" is an existential, elating delight.