Recommended by Christian Flynn

Verité is a delicate little puzzlebox of a piece. It's about faces and how they change what we see. I know 'cause I got to see it three times with six different faces. I'm sure there are a ton of secrets about sophie fit in here, but she'll never tell.

Roll over Kushner, and tell Junot Diaz the news.

A perfect play.

Gorgeous. Horrifying. Perfect. If you want the shock of the new, you've found it.

Otto can't settle down. He needs things to be exactly right. He has something building inside him and it has to come out. Does he need to confess? To prove his love? Or is it something much more sinister?

Key to the play is a standout monologue about halfway through from Casey. She tells him he can't fight for her. That any version of her he wants to fight with is gone. He took it. Whatever "she" was to him is no longer what she is. It's a thriller hidden as a divorce play — and a tight one.

The Ice Cream Scooper is lost, they're spinning, out in a world that doesn't accommodate them; maybe it's because they take ice cream too seriously, maybe it's because they take any wage-job seriously at all. They want to do a job scooping ice cream. Is it sadder that no one cares or that they've been conned into caring this much about a survival job?

Really funny. Biting too.

I got to see this play performed three times for three audiences and it always unsettled and touched them. From the offstage screaming patients to the silent orderly to the blood to the strange dilemma of government-controlled time travel, Sterile Processing is a weird, cold, uncompromising tale that briefly becomes comfortable between the two characters but never quite warm. It's funny as well.

"And when I make my way outside, into an empty public, I notice no one’s there. I make my journey into a desert, a neo-Jesús, everything Judean, all of us one sexy, sick Judas, pining for the next person to make toothless."

"The high-pitched screech and squeal of burning rubber in orbit. Hydraulic pump, rickshaw car frame, bustling like yer brother in bunk bed, post- virginal, post-sixty-second homecoming fuck."

"Call ‘em shit beans. Call me shit- mouth. Well, my shit-mouth turns to a shit-fist, and knuckles meet a jawbone."

I mean what's there to say? Brutal poetry.

We have this funny delusion — maybe it's from our schooling, maybe Fukuyama — that history moves forward; that the past was a series of mistakes we've corrected; that from here on into eternity it's all sharpening the saw. It's the suburban myth — the perfection of existence; the good occasionally challenged by deviants but never broken. What's past is dead. Does not carry. Our lives are the same way. Better every year. Stronger. Smarter. Our past was golden and our best days are yet to come.

Anyway this play is about Our Town and it's place in American Theatre.

This play is simple, bloody, and barrels forward so fast that you don't even realize it's taken you to hell. It's characters are topical but forces are elemental; it features the central war of many of Patrick's plays: a rotted man who's impervious to change and a woman of exceptional grace who will spare no dignity to change him.

One of those rare plays that comes along and nails a topical issue right between the eyes in a visceral, real, human, way. A rare play with a clear protagonist, villain, and side characters that doesn’t feel hackneyed. A rare play that relies on plot and tension—that’s almost a thriller—and still invests so heavily in it’s characters. The first play in a long time that genuinely made me so uncomfortable I had to put it down for a bit. Read this play. It won’t be free for long.