Recommended by Hallie Palladino

This play is stunningly beautiful. I saw a reading of the one character version last night at Jackalope. Svich captures a moment in childhood where dreams collide with future realities. The play is a devastating meditation on inequality, greed and consumer culture as seen through the eyes of a child grappling with the gulf between potential and opportunity. The story is dynamic, nuanced and beautifully layered. Svich's poetry and imagery are breathtaking.

This elegant play is a meditation on the heartbreaking tradeoffs that new mothers face and the way this transition can impact marriage, career and sense of self. It's so important to have stories about what really happens when women have children from the point of view of women. This play is creative and surprising and heartwrenching.

This ten minute play is smart and charming with a delightfully unexpected twist. It also says a lot about the way boys are pressured to perform their masculinity in competitive environments and it would be a great short piece for students since there are so many roles for young men.

This play brings together a young woman on the verge of adulthood with a group of women in their seventies who are trying to get empowered in a very deliberate way and find a place for themselves after lives spent as wives and mothers. This emotions this play creates are bittersweet because it's about how a desire to have more agency doesn't always mean we get to exercise it, at least not always in a grand way. The friendships between these women are beautiful and this all feels very real. These are stories of women we don't normally see.

These absurdist comedies about squirrel problems are a hilarious metaphor for social issues ranging from class to race to gun violence. A timely dark comedy about middle class liberal hypocrisy.

A beautifully crafted, unflinching portrait of a family trying to survive in the upside down world of a refugee camp. Farzana is thrust into an unlikely marriage, gambling that she may just get an education. A complex and surprising family drama about loyalty and the lengths people are willing to go to in a time of crisis. This play is full of unexpected, highly specific characters and situations that bring to life a part of the world we rarely see on stage, and certainly if we do never like this.

VEDA IN TIME begins as a delightful send up of yoga culture, or rather a certain style of yoga cultural appropriation among privileged white women and becomes a meditation on the quest for the spiritual in our materialistic times. As Veda earnestly sets out on her journey of self-actualization she must confront a controlling master (literally a walnut tree), a group of yoga poses come to life, her own religious parents, and a martyred saint. This play is charmingly absurd while asking serious questions about the origins of faith and how we treat the natural world.

A charming short piece about connection, yearning and what makes us human.

This terrifying short comedy imagines a world where drones ostensibly used for shopping are always listening and tracking even our most casual off-hand remarks--and making judgments about who we are. This is the dangerous future that is coming now we're signing our lives away to Amazon. Battleground is scary because it seems so plausible.

This ten minute dark comedy takes on a dysfunctional mother-child dynamic and gives it an absurdist twist. The result is that the power struggle between an emotionally abusive parent and an adult child is dramatized in a clever and hilarious way. With knife throwing.