Recommended by Andrew Martineau

Can the recurring dreams of a child following an accidental tragic loss heal the wounds between grieving parents or perpetuate that grief? This short play offers no easy answers, but Arthur Jolly creates the emotional hurt in such a dramatic way to reveal how that the mother’s nightmares haunt the couple and might possibly tear their relationship apart for good. Spellbinding work.

Vivian Lermond has an incredible talent for making her characters’ way of speaking fit perfectly with their personalities and experiences. In just a couple of pages, we know who Andy is by how he speaks, and yet we don’t know the specifics of where his story is going. That kind of delineation between concrete characterization and a surprising plot twist shows some expert writing skills that make this monologue truly wonderful!

This is a captivating short play about two cousins who are dealing with strong emotions and hormones, as they discuss the similarities between the girl and the boy's mother, who is apparently undergoing shock treatments for her anxiety, a sad, disturbing reality back in the 1950s. Debra Cole has written a brief drama with naturalistic dialogue of that era and an intriguing premise. It reminds me a little bit of John Irving's style, which I have always enjoyed. Very nicely done!

So many monologues for actors get lost in past events without giving the actor something to fight for--right here, right now. Chris Plumridge has written a beautifully expressive, deeply touching missive from a new father to his infant son, and while there is natural projection into the future, as any new father's musings to his child will be, the words are centered on the here and now and the stakes are incredibly high. "You'll find your own way," he says, and we are in that moment, rooting for this innocent little baby to do just that.

What is so inspiring about Nora’s monologue is the way in which the character is thinking out loud and trying to keep up with the shifting culture of her young students while simultaneously advocating for their rights to be their authentic selves. Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Many people still are, and the quotes of her work in this monologue add so much dramatically without the inclusion of them sounding like an academic paper. Impressive work.

Only a very skilled writer can offer an intriguing, original premise, surprise you, and hit you with a profound message in a mere five pages. Jacqueline Floyd-Priskorn gives us a thought-provoking lesson on how a sense of entitlement and disrespect can eventually leave you empty-handed. Excellent!

Shoes can be such powerful, painful reminders of a life violently taken, and Scott Sickles brilliantly uses these common possessions to show the love between a grandmother and granddaughter. I love the simple dramatic action of the tying of shoes to convey that profound sense of love. There are other visceral images in this brief play, as well, such as a soundless scream into another common object of everyday life. Sickles also weaves intricate layers of culture into his drama and shows us how differences in how we grieve can have an immense impact on how we cope. Beautiful.

A mother's surprise over raisins added to potato salad shows how disorienting grief can be after a senseless school shooting. We also feel her pain in the thought of cleaning up dishes by well-intentioned neighbors and understand the urge to break all the dishes to deal with the anger raging inside her. Donnelly's superb monologue is heartbreaking in its timeliness, and I had to see when it was written, which was in 2019. Sadly, it is even more timely today, and this is a monologue that desperately needs to be seen and heard.

This is a touching monologue honoring a father, which is exactly what I wanted to read on Father’s Day. The beauty of Dave Patton’s tribute is that it is not sappy or sentimental; it has real grit and poetry to it, such as “the iron smell of blood mixed with unfrozen chemicals.” Just beautiful.

I thoroughly enjoyed the originality of a theatrical piece about writing a cover letter, a subject I never would have thought to dramatize. And yet, Cole Hunter Dzubak makes it work. There is a Greek chorus-esque approach to showing us the mind-numbing, soul-killing tedium of composing a letter that is next impossible to perfect and one that typically draws a frustrating number of rejections. Nice work, Cole. I would love to see what a talented director and cast could do with this!