Recommended by Ricardo Soltero-Brown

We owe so much to the parents of slaughtered children. We owe more to the children, that's the whole point that the mother in Salsbury's play is really making. She, the character, the woman, the mother of a child murdered in a school shooting, has sacrificed and she should be heard. It is ridiculous and gross and tragic and absurd that this character has found a way to connect and connect and connect with school after school after school. The dialogue here with a mother and, wouldn't you know it, a police officer is devastating.

This's certainly one of the most effective monologues concerning experience of a school shooting that I've read. The girl is angry and confounded and somehow makes sense - within her purge and journey - of the political arguments that are coming (or are soon to come) against her and those with what is her less-and-less unique position. She breaks down the absurdity of teachers obtaining and utilizing guns as a deterrent. More or easier access to violence in response to violence is simply not the answer. Everett Robert's monologue both blooms and oozes at the cracks. An enraging, fuming work.

Carnes manifests a reflection that is at once all too clinical, crippling, heart wrenching, and - also -mobilizing. The breakdown of the rifle here is set against the breakdown of modern education and we are tasked with the question of which requires more focus, because the fact is the two are becoming - or, it could be argued, are currently - inseparable, bonded by blood. This is an urgent warning and a devastating rumination on what's worth protecting, what's worth allowing our children easier access to.

Darcy Parker Bruce has created a work of art that concerns and focuses itself so wholly on three states of being: knower of tragedy, survivor of tragedy, and victim of tragedy; the three states are personified by Viv, Langley, and Ollie respectively. Langley is in a delicate position, one where guilt and even a sense of debt are accrued to the point that a transmogrification, a transmutation, simply a transition must, must, must occur. I haven't read words like this since Naomi Wallace. A daring task to accept and leave the past in order to accept and enter the future.

A child's logic, by miracle, mystery, or mercy, is usually difficult to argue. Adults will introduce the concept of, "Well, when you're older," in order to exert or exercise some social construct of authority. The child's sense in Wyndham's shattering monologue stops us cold. Our society's youth is taking stock of its surroundings. Why do they have to survive this, why is the central subject here part of their performance, part of their integration, their education? This is an agonizing, confounding, distressing, frustrating, deceptively simple work. Honor the children. Listen to the children. What? Are you too afraid to argue?

Partain's monologue reminds us from start to finish how wrong it is for people this age to die. She effectively uses the polar opposites of love and hate to tell Anna's story. It's heartbreaking how little love needs, and absurd that hate has so many tools.

Burbano makes a hard, stiff drink out of this play. She straight pours you a double. Two characters find themselves extending, resisting, resigning, and reaching out to each other. The brutal and urgent metaphor that Burbano creates regarding those who really deal with the mess and aftermath of a school shooting is swift, stark, stunning, and humbling.

Burdick's ruminative romp stokes both bashful and genuine laughs as two men attempt to demystify just what in the blazes it is the gods have thrown their way. The consternations they accumulate are paralyzingly comic. They seem to get it, but they're never going to get it. You could argue that's their secret.

Men were taught, when they were younger, when they were boys, a perverted version of confidence; that it was superior to empathy, the essence of self-worth, tantamount to a healthy self-esteem. Catharsis can be anticipated, even sought, but the actual moment is a surprise, that's what it is, that's the point; and the one that playwright Bublitz sets up for Chris mines us with both pathos and humor, that is to say with a dose of humanity. 'Toxic' is a welcome meditation on the urgency to address misconstructed masculinity, and the necessity of redefining it, and the dangers of not.

What a menacing delight of a play! Built on a lovely and hilariously growing tension, this sneaky smirk of a work by Jessica Moss morphs from a wry romantic comedy into an absolutely luscious language play, dark and drastic; the best of all its surprises is its complete and acrobatic leap (over what others may have served as a melodrama manqué) into a most dangerously deadly resistance. This is going to be so much fun for any team. Brava!