With her Pulitzer Prize finalist THE WOLVES, young playwright Sarah DeLappe has beautifully, movingly, and realistically captured the tenuousness that comes with being a teenage girl navigating the thorny terrain of high school. DeLappe has captured so precisely the agony and nuances of high school female friendship. In this 90-minute play about an indoor high school girls’ soccer team, DeLappe presents the achingly real challenges of life as a teenage girl in suburban America. While the nine members of the eponymous Wolves are fierce soccer players on the field, these three-dimensional characters have much more to contend with once they step off.

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Based on the title alone, Antoinette Nwandu’s “BREACH: a manifesto on race in america through the eyes of a black girl recovering from self-hate” does not sound like a comedy. And yet in BREACH, Nwandu has written a laugh-out-loud satirical piece that also has a real beating heart in its exploration of race and identity in modern-day America. Nwandu’s characters are intentionally broadly drawn and the play has many outsized comedic moments, but BREACH also has humanity running through it.

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Porchlight Artistic Director’s intimate staging of Sondheim’s 1981 musical MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG vividly brings to life this piece that chronicles the lives of three close friends as they attempt to gain professional success as artist. While composer Frank Shepard strikes it big as a Hollywood film composer and producer, he leaves his closest friends—lyricist and playwright Charley Kringas and writer Mary Flynn—in the dust. Despite its sunny title, MERRILY is a rather cynical musical about friendship and the revelation that it’s quite lonely at the top. The twist—and one of the main reasons why MERRILY is rarely produced and challenging to stage—is that the musical takes place in reverse chronological order. We see these three “Old Friends” move from jaded success stories back to idealistic hopefuls just starting their careers and forging their tight-knit friendships. MERRILY makes a great deal of sense right now because we are living in mighty cynical times—and watching these central characters contend with the demands of Hollywood has an added sting in this moment.

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