New Playwrights: The Best Plays, 2012

Editor Harbison has put together an extremely uneven collection of plays, mostly centered on the Drama Desk Award nominations, for which he sat on the committee in 2012. There is a two-hander, a large-cast drama about plagiarism at the New York Times, and everything in between, but only a few of the plays truly hit the emotional notes they reach for. Stephen Sachs's Bakersfield Mist plays comedy and tragedy simultaneously, which is as close as this collection gets to perfection, and Kirsten Greenidge's Milk Like Sugar is a standout response to the grown generations always wondering why the next generation is so lost. Meanwhile, plays like CQ/CX by Gabe McKinley and The Invested by Sharyn Rothstein are so committed to being ripped from the headlines that by the time they're produced, they will be old news. Chad Beckim's After manages to straddle the line between culturally relevant and dramatically interesting with aplomb, while Eddie Antar's The Navigator and Anna Kerrigan's The Talls seem content with being milquetoast.