Recommended by Andrew Martineau

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.

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!

This play more or less forces its audience to think about how someone from a different culture from their own might be subjected to inane questions when they just want to grill for the holiday. When the other ”other” in the store line is a ghost, we might just have to examine our biases about how we think ghosts are supposed to behave. Such an awesome short play. Well done, Austin!

This is a extra-special Christmas play that works on multiple levels. It tells a Biblical story without oversimplification, and it tells the story of a boy who has challenges that not everyone understands but who goes all out, and I mean, ALL out, and makes me really, really want to see this live. We need more Christmas stories like this one!

The finality of a delete action feels devastating when it’s our written work, but how do we reconcile a hasty choice that has fatal consequences? Jacqueline Floyd-Priskorn has written an amazing short play that addresses mortality, tragic choices, and the ignorance of what those choices can mean when we don’t understand the effects of an erratic, emotional response that cannot be reversed. This is unsettling in the best possible way.

The idea of just starting civilization over again seems encouraging in these troubling times, but Eden 2 offers a grim reminder that human beings can be selfish and myopic. Morey Norkin gives his audience a cautionary tale that ends with the realization that evil might prevail even when we are given a stark message of how we got here in the first place. Wonderful!