Recommended by Leah Plante-Wiener

Fills you with dread like you wouldn't believe. Also super funny. McIntosh is leading the charge on writing plays where girls get to beat each other up. Thank god!

McIntosh has a gift among gifts: a fine tuning into what makes an audience lean in, and what makes them recoil in their seats. Road Kills was a visceral, communal experience not unlike riding a rollercoaster, charming us with a titillating ride to the peak before plunging us into the stomach-churning drop of a lifetime. McIntosh fearlessly asks us to interrogate our empathic impulses in the face of taboo, and we can't help but follow her every step of the way.

Gorgeous, brutal, haunting. Ele has a profound talent for deploying language as both weapon of seduction and knife-sharp destruction. The realm of Rose of The World is an intoxicating one where the walls listen a little too close; where we are at the mercy of ambition, paranoia, envy, hunger, and every ghost you could imagine, but where the unsaid rules as most violent. Karina— whose introduction is unforgettable— is a masterclass in self-destruction. This is a play that lingers, in all of its ravaged beauty and ghoulishness.

Sharp, mean, sizzling, but ultimately comforting in its shit-that’s-so-me familiarity, Everyone in New York is Beautiful is a biting reminder that we’re all a little more scared than we give each other credit for. Flynn has a gift for weaving together unique characters with intimately recognizable idiosyncrasies (the edgy leftist podcaster flailing for attention, the ex-Christian desperate for a new identity, the aimless intern) while still surprising us with the ways in which they hurt each other and themselves. I’m in need of more twentysomething living room plays like this.

If the itch inside your brain were a play, this would be it.