Recommended by Daniel Prillaman

Do they really simulate lockdown drills like this now?!

The past years have been traumatic for everyone. But the kids are taking it in on another level. Blevins' dramatic, heart-wrenching series of scenes shows all too well what our youngest generations are going through and growing into, and it's not pretty. While a fringe of this country has warped access to weapons of mass destruction to mean personal liberty, this is the havoc wrought on our children. Utter, irrevocable terror. Day after day after day. I long for a day this isn't a badly necessary play.

This play is actually very sound advice...in case a giant eye appears in the sky. How would you react? Could you commit to your own life in the face of such circumstances, or be overwhelmed by a need to know? A need to be right? I appreciate the exploration not in support of behaving anti-intellectually, but rationally. Without assumptions. It's the same advice I give myself that I don't often follow, why worry about something before it's a problem?

Well, because it blinks, of course.

When the clock turned us into the new millennium, I was just young enough to not have to worry about it. The same cannot be said for Oty's fun cast, who must face not only the clock, but the hardest transition of all, graduating from high school. This is a nostalgic journey about coming of age, figuring out what you want from life, and the realization that some friends might not stay friends forever. Just like good gas station candy, it's bittersweet and full of verve.

When you disregard the occasional difference in that one is sometimes more by choice than the other, is there really a difference between leaving and dying? The distance between Earth and any afterlife is probably about the same as Earth and Venus...

Kantor always knocks it out of the park with fully realized voices and pitch-perfect world-building. This one-act is no different. Here, a likely final meeting between two sisters turns tragically short when an itinerary demands it's time to go. It's brutal. At least the sunrise is pretty.

Walker’s grim circumstances of (unarticulated?) grief give way to a couple’s dark exploration of sexual desire. This is a raw fucking short, riddled with disturbing fantasies, the ethics of watching porn, and the very worst of patriarchal attraction. For those who can stomach the ride, it’s a fearless play that plumbs the depths of human connection and expression. Are Dana and Rob just trying to feel something, anything? What are they really thinking? What we are? And is it any more than the secrets we leave behind? A haunting, enthralling final image.

Hilarious. I’m hard-pressed to think of something more fun. LeBlanc has crafted a duo that feels simultaneously plucked from Shakespeare and Python in equal measure. This is top-tier banter. Their logic, actually, is irrefutable, and this is a piece that would…*ahem* kill at any short festival, no matter its focus.

At once relentlessly tragic and desperately hopeful, BONEFRUIT is a staggering short play. Evocative of the oldest folk tales and legend, Plante-Wiener constructs her setting with a microscopic focus on the relationship betwixt Lark and Anhedonia. It’s the best kind of world-building, spoon-feeding us nothing, but allowing us to discern the rules and meanings of everything at our own pace. A beautiful mediation on connection, family, love, and survival.

A jovial twist on two mafia grunts filming a hit for the boss, there’s not much I can say about Mandryk’s short piece that won’t give away the fun. What I can get away with is that we all know the turn is coming, just not exactly how and when. How and when is absolutely pitch-perfect, grimly terrifying, unearthly amusing, and just so so good. A great little horror for any spooky festival.

Despite the connection offered us by social media, we are perhaps ironically closer to the titular endlings more than we know. We’re not the last of our species, but we are just as distraught, stressed, hopeless, and lonely when we face the state of the world. And, of course, another big difference is that we’re the ones who caused it. A powerful condemnation of humanity’s carelessness with the planet, as well as a fine meditation on ending, and knowing your time is limited. It means those you share it with mean everything.

We all watch TUB WARZ for the same reasons we want to be on TUB WARZ. Punishment, vindication, to feel feelings, tbh it really shouldn’t matter, should it?

Wien’s tight ten minute is a surreal descent into the murkiest depths of humanity and what we are capable of inflicting upon one another. It’s not pretty. It’s scary, actually. But at least it pays the bills? Maybe? Click that like button and subscribe, y’all.