Recommended by Jillian Blevins

In her portrait of two weirdos bonded in their weirdness, Cate Berg’s playful and powerful dialogue allows a grandmother and grandson to broach the difficult subjects of death, grief, and belonging through collaborative storytelling. The specificity of this intergenerational connection, and their mode of relating to one another, makes this play a stand-out among others exploring similar themes. LANDIS AND THE BEAR is also a wonderful vehicle for an older actress, an all-too-rare offering.

The beauty of Peter Chansky’s CAMOUFLAGE is how it gestures towards familiar tropes—the doofus husband, the exasperated wife—and then lovingly deconstructs them, exposing the tender vulnerability of real people fumbling towards a better understanding of themselves and each other.

With superb pacing and musicality (and surreal interludes including a game show and a full-on song and dance) Ijames’ Dickensian historical/political fever dream is as darkly funny as it is unsparing. Martha Washington’s deathbed nightmare is a chillingly perfectly allegory for America’s ongoing reckoning with systemic racism and white supremacy: we may benefit, but it’s not our fault! Why should we be punished for systems we didn’t create? And I’m one of the good ones, right?! Martha’s excuses, guilt, and willful ignorance reveal the inextricable link between America’s identity and slavery.

Lovecraftian horror meets a university play? I’m in! Sign me up! Funnel every episode down my throat with a cursed beer bong! I can’t contain my excitement for the rest of this series—with so much lore to draw on, and tropes ripe for dismantling, the potential in this mash-up is huge.

Rather than sweeping it under the rug, first installment of SPOOKY U wisely skewers H.P. Lovecraft’s deplorable racism in its central engine. A Black university student summoned to Mistatonik University prepares to encounter institutional racism in academia and dark forces and old gods. Yikes!

If anything is ripe for satire, it’s social media, and Richter hits it out of the park in THE SOAPBOX NETWORK. He takes a witty premise—how would our social-networking posts translate in “real life”—delivers with economy, and sticks the landing with a killer reversal that drives home the *real* reason we’re all leaving Facebook. Like, share, subscribe.

The CAMP! A delightfully bitchy send-up of old Hollywood studio drama, with touches of All About Eve and Waiting for Guffman. Scott Sickles' serious comedic chops and breadth of pop culture knowledge synergize into pitch-perfect satire which will delight movie fans of every stripe. The titles and clips from fictional movies Sickles has conjured up for LOST STARLET are comic delights. What I wouldn't give to see a team of skilled actors perform the drag-icon-worthy roles that this play offers up on a silver platter.

Sibling relationships are rich territory for exploration; we were shaped by the same events and the same parents, and yet we often perceive that shared experience in vastly different ways. Samantha Vargas’ paranormal family play takes this relatable brother-sister dynamic—-the question of “what really happened in our shared childhood?”—and blows it up to fantastical, cryptozoological proportions. With rich dialogue equally inflected with Spanish, the X-Files, and The Goonies, and some of the most evocative stage directions I’ve yet read (sound designers will thrill to create Vargas’ sci-fi soundscape), SFTIB is an adventure you’ll want to take.

A perfectly terrifying horror short, TOO OLD capitalizes on an audiences expectations, setting us up for a stomach-dropping and satisfying twist that feels both inevitable and surprising. A killer addition to any Halloween play festival.

Ashley Rose Wellman’s KILL SHELTER manages to be both intimate and expansive—a fitting contradiction for a play that insists on nuance and moral ambiguity. Colleen and Ellie’s well-drawn mother-daughter relationship anchors a story that tackles generational curses, abortion rights, euthanasia, teen parenthood and poverty. The real miracle of the play is how naturally these heavy issues are woven into the narrative, and how light a touch Wellman manages to have with them.

The heartbreaking puppet sequences are uniquely theatrical and unflinchingly humane. Uncertainty is at the heart of KILL SHELTER—and that’s it’s greatest strength.

THE WALMART PLAY is an absurdist comedy that confronts late stage capitalism and its attendant horrors (child labor, gun violence, a pervading sense of purposelessness) and gives them the finger (before shooting it off and setting it on fire). Anastasia West’s surreal, metatheatrical corporate hellscape is full of darkly hilarious one-liners, and comic callbacks that get funnier as the play goes on. West’s theatrical imagination is huge—directors and designers will be challenged and delighted to realize her twisted vision in all its flaming glory.