Anyone who has aspired to a career as an actor is likely to have experienced alternating emotional states—sometimes elation, frequently sadness—that accompany success, or the lack of it. Philippa Lawford’s thoughtful, often intense play Cold Water explores the way that youthful aspirations, tempered by reality, can elicit angst, confusion, anger, and occasionally relief, with varying impact, on two people at a British middle school.

Inspired by a true story, Max Mondi’s Maybe Tomorrow is a new drama that pushes the envelope on what it means to get stuck in the present. Directed by Chad Austin, this play takes a deep dive into mental illness and more.

Peter Danish’s Last Call is a fairy tale with heroes, villains, operatic emotions, and a countertenor. It’s a three-actor play set in the magical kingdom of classical music during the era of two potentates, Herbert von Karajan (1908–89) and Leonard Bernstein (1918–90), who reigned supreme in concert halls and recording studios around the world for much of the 20th century.

A one-man Uncle Vanya could easily have come off as a stunt. How do you turn an Anton Chekhov staple, one that has visited New York stages multiple times in the past few seasons alone, into a solo show, and an utterly new experience? But Vanya turns out to be good theater and, more surprisingly, very good Chekhov.

Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, Leo Tolstoy famously wrote in his opening line of Anna Karenina, and Joshua Harmon shows that every unhappy family member is unhappy in her own way in We Had a World, his stirring new play that gets at universal truths through a very personal story.

For all the theater community’s opposition to Donald Trump, there have been relatively few stage works taking on Trumpism. Amerikin, by Chisa Hutchinson, looks like it could be one during its first half, with its portrayal of “just your white supremacists next door,” but the story heads in a different direction when new characters and themes are introduced in Act II. Though her first act is definitely stronger, Hutchinson overall has crafted an absorbing look at life in these United States.