Recommended by Jillian Blevins

Ricardo Soltero-Brown is one of the most exciting playwrights working today. With wit, empathy, and intellectual deftness, his plays explore the ways modern social and linguistic conventions constrain and divide us. His characters, trying and failing to say the “correct” thing, end up saying the quiet parts—the things we’re not supposed to say—out loud.
In THE EXTENSION—on the surface about a politician and a loan shark—Soltero-Brown takes aim at sexual politics, and how our gender-based expectations and grievances stand in the way of communication and connection. A taut two-hander full of twists and turns.

Surrey Houlker captures the pain, awkwardness, and joys of tween friendship alongside the persistence and strangeness of grief in THE DEAD DADZ CLUB.
The early 2000’s setting is both nostalgic and smart; these kids are barely on the internet and have one “emergencies-only” cell phone between them, forcing them to seek connection “IRL”.
The play’s nonlinear structure (and one very clever scenic device) keeps us on our toes as the Club’s dynamics shift. At heart, TDDC is a sensitive character study, its six kids distinctly and tenderly drawn, each trying to deal with impossible grief.

What determines our destiny? Social, familial, and religious expectations? Our genetics, generational curses and inherited traumas? Force of will? Or is it as as the Greeks once believed, an inevitable and certain end, regardless of the path we take to get there?

BANSHEE obsesses over this question, circling around it again and again. Richter’s lyrical prose keeps this briskly-paced one act buoyant, even as it delves into darker and darker territory. His vivid characters are matched by a powerful sense of place; designers would be lucky to render this moody supernatural fable.

I heard an excerpt from SCHOOL PICTURES on This American Life and was charmed, moved, and desperate for more. The play doesn’t disappoint; Cramer creates funny, tender portraits of tweens and teens, peppered with self-deprecating humor that’s recognizable to anyone who’s felt like an imposter pretending to be a grown-up, or desperately wanted to be liked by a kid (notoriously impossible). They play’s thesis—about who gets to tell stories, and about our broken education system and our broken world—is an open-ended question, rather than a statement. Grown-ups are just looking for answers, too.

Dave Osmundsen’s plays consistently affect me in three ways: they make me cry, make me laugh, and challenge me. MORE OF A HEART is powerful play about how society suppresses and fetishizes neurodivergence, and how important it is for autistic people to control their own lives and their own narratives. It’s also just a fantastic family play, touching and infuriating and full of messy imperfect love. MORE OF A HEART is a story that I will continue to carry with me as a parent, reminding me that best way to love my kids is to listen.

ITOU is the best kind of sci-fi, where abstract concepts—faith, identity, the afterlife—are made literal and urgent by speculative circumstances (in this case, advanced AI technology which can recreate consciousness from recorded memories).

ITOU reminds me a bit of my favorite episode of Black
Mirror, and a bit of John Mighton’s quantum physics romance, POSSIBLE WORLDS—but this play is uniquely John Mabey. Gina’s transness is an essential element of her character and the play. It’s not her trauma, but her superpower, allowing her to imagine a self that shifts and expands and contains multitudes.

JULIE is a funny, furious, and surprisingly faithful adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Transposed to post-pandemic NYC with Pride standing in for Midummer’s Eve, playwright Kaela Mei-Shing Garvin’s retelling recasts Jean, Julie and Christine (here Kristin) as queer women, an effective choice which neutralizes the original play’s misogyny problem and refocuses the story on class disparity.

Garvin also dispenses with Strindberg’s naturalism, allowing Jean & Julie’s coupling to warp reality in more ways than one. The violent and seemingly inevitable ending is where this adaptation really soars beyond the source material. Screw landlords.

A refreshing psychological horror without a drop of blood a single casualty; the creeping terror playwright Heyman has wrought is much more subtle and sinister. Echoes of Jeffrey Dahmer’s “zombie” fantasy resound in this short play about power and control, submission and dominance. HEY BABE is dark and disturbing (and, like many of its predecessors in the horror genre, discomfortingly sexy). The allegory about financial abuse and coercion is resonant and thought provoking, inspiring questions about the power imbalances in our own relationships. HEY BABE would be an unforgettable addition to any horror-themed playfest.

This absurdist bake-off yields a delightful layer cake of a play. Imagine if Kafka watched The Food Network, or Albee was a fan of Mary Berry—then you might get something that comes close to DON’T TOUCH THE CARROT CAKE. However, Emily McClain goes a step beyond disorienting surrealism with a slyly, subtly feminist cri de coeur: why are the expectations placed on women so ridiculous? Why do we pretend they’re not? Are we all participating in a game that’s impossible to win?

The funniest play about depression that I've ever read. This hysterical short accomplishes so much in so few pages: original, evocative world building, dynamic and specific characters who leap off the page, and gut-busting, laugh-out-loud one-liners. Rae Dunn decor mashed up with dark fantasy and some earnest, moving messaging about what we have to live for when we're in our darkest places. Jacquelyn Floyd-Priskorn evokes a female millennial Neil Gaimon here--and that's a high compliment.