To have your play produced on Broadway is naturally very exciting, and when it's your Broadway debut all the more so. But, when that debut is produced by 14-time Grammy winner Alicia Keys, who has also written original musical for your play? Well, that's just the kind of magical year that playwright Lydia R. Diamond is having.

Diamond (no relation, but great last name) is this week's Character Approved pick here because her play, Stick Fly, is an important new work that's already won a slew of awards, with more definitely coming her way.

Stick Fly centers on the LeVays, an affluent African American family who comes together to spend a summer weekend at their Martha's Vineyard home. The adult sons, aspiring novelist Kent (played by Dulé Hill from Psych!) and golden boy plastic surgeon Flip, have each brought their respective ladies (one black and one white) to meet the parents. Food, drink, and Trivial Pursuit tangle with class, race, and identity politics in this contemporary comedy of manners.

Diamond gives each of the characters full voices, and Broadway audiences have been eating it up.

[Image: Elizabeth Lippman]