Recommended by Jillian Blevins

“Two people can have the same goal and disagree about how to get it.” This sentiment, spoken by THE ACTIVIST’s ardently truthful protagonist, is a dangerous one to speak aloud. Olive’s constitutional inability to conform—her reluctance to couch her real feelings, curb her need for specificity and clarity, or deny her messy humanity—is her fatal flaw in what feels like the first “tragedy of manners” I’ve ever read.

Soltero-Brown’s funhouse-mirror reflection of the left eating itself is written with dead-pan humor, searing intellect, and unflinching vulnerability. It’s a necessary play.

Female body horror hits different. Our whole lives are body horror. Our bodies feel both alien and somehow all that matters about us. Our bodies don’t exist for *us*. We’re taught to hide our biology, our base humanity, our stinkiness… so of course, in private, we wallow in it.

Kelsey Sullivan’s gross-out horror short makes excellent use of the sacred liminal space that all women know: the sleepover. (Her stage directions note that “there is no time”—she’s right.) Imaginative directors and designers will revel in the mayhem.

If Ionesco were alive today, perhaps he’d have written THIS GRASS KILLS PEOPLE. Thankfully, Prillaman took up up the call.

TGKP is a modern-day Cassandra fable in which “KEEP OFF THE GRASS” is a dire warning. Rife with uncertainly and ambiguity, it captures the self-recrimination of the pandemic age: to preserve life, we’ve stopped our own, subjected ourselves to alienation and abuse, watched other people experiencing the freedoms we long for and often felt isolated and lonely. And when consequences come knocking, we feel not vindicated, but as if we’ve failed to do enough. Devastating.

A TRAGEDY OF OWLS is masterful in its economy. In John Mabey’s imagining of a forgotten moment from history, not a single word is wasted; many of his spare lines ring with multiple meanings, speaking at once to the specific and the universal, the mundane and the transcendent. This level of craft can be easily overlooked. It doesn’t call attention to itself, and that subtly itself is evidence of the playwright’s artistry.

It feels as if Mabey and his play are communing with history, answering his muse’s real life plea: “let it be known.”

THE GOOD WORD is somehow a play for the social-media age without once mentioning social media itself. Through its magical-realist premise, it explores the weight we place on our voices: on being heard, asserting our identities, and being an individual without saying the ‘wrong thing’. SHE’s biologically-imposed year of silence (called ‘Stillness’ in the play’s Black-Mirroresque world) is like the ultimate version of deleting your Facebook/Twitter/Instagram, with its attendant feelings of loss, invisibility, existential terror and ultimately, freedom.

Katy Laurance is an expert at worldbuilding, crafting complex lore without over-explaining. A thought-provoking, original social satire.

LUMIN feels a little bit Midsommar, a little bit Cohen brothers, and little bit like your favorite investigative podcast. What strikes me most about this slow-burn thriller/family drama is its deep sense of place: Emma Gibson’s vision of Lumin, a cultish “sustainable community” in the Texan desert is so clear and unsettling, designers will thrill to bring it to life. Her original characters are just as well-drawn. Ma’s reserved, placid menace makes her a spectacularly original antagonist; determined, shattered Clancy, and fragile, delightfully odd Liv pop off the page too.

Pregnancy always feels vaguely sci-fi. In GENERATION, Nat Cassidy takes that to a horrifying extreme. With purposeful ambiguity and a surgical level of restraint, this play allows an audience’s imagination to fill in the blanks, resulting in a terrifyingly effective moral parable—more deeply frightening and relevant in a post-Roe America.

In the past several years, we’ve seen many excellent plays about adolescent girlhood; FOUNDERS, KEEPERS stands out amid the pack in its portrayal of tween girls rewriting the US constitution as the country burns. Exceptionally funny, tender-hearted, truthful and prescient, Aurora Behlke’s political allegory hits so many unexpectedly perfect notes. Her premise reminds us that America is a young country, that words are meaningless without action, and that nothing lasts forever. Our nation’s own painful adolescence may be just beginning, but with writers like Behlke making themselves heard, the kids may just be all right.

High school heartache has its own gravity; decades pass, and still we’re pulled towards the moments—and people—who taught us who we are.

Brandon Monokian’s poetic and sensitive ECHO & NARCISSUS… is a painfully relatable meditation on queer longing, and how our formative relationships define our lives, even as we try to leave them in the past. A metatheatrical twist (the playwright-protagonist has written his own Echo and Narcissus play) and the powerful marriage of structure and content (stars feature prominently, and the narrative itself orbits one fateful night) elevate this sentimental ode to unrequited love.

ROCKET YOURSELF TO THE MOON’s premise—a mega-corporation’s quest for “full market penetration” leads to the destruction of the planet—should be absurd. What’s truly horrifying is just how close to reality Charlotte Lang’s existential nightmare of a play hews.

The playwright tempers her scathing indictment of capitalist myopia with surreal touches (tap dancing minions! Never ending drug side effects! A moldy rat-cow mascot costume!) and pitch-perfect corporate gibberish (“the Marketing Director works closely with the Director of Marketing,”) bristling with Brechtian flair. A hilarious and terrifying satire of late stage capitalism.