Recommended by Charles Scott Jones

Terrific intimate horror! So cool and wonderfully theatrical how YOU’VE REACHED JUSTIN progresses, how a personal problem gives way to a cataclysmic everybody problem. Then the two co-exist as the implicit/explicit reality of this wonderful piece takes hold. The voicemail fragments are a fabulous means for storytelling because as the narrative skips ahead the reader fills in the gaps. Once Justin and Daniel are face to face you can feel everything stop! The tension is huge because of the rich backstory and on-going story we share. Christian St. Croix has written a superb short horror drama. Read this!!

As a long-time patron of bars and art houses, I’m enamored of this. Outstanding barroom prattle - wisecracks on the surface, with underlying sadness of folks throwing their lives away. The conversation about a painting done by the bartender’s son is superb, fascinating. Drama holds a mirror up to life and when the stage has an abstract painting that the characters imagine themselves in, there’s magic, wonderful depth to Libby Heily’s INFERENCE AND DEDUCTION. With characters so vivid I feel like I know them even as they seem to exist in the painting--Wow, that's something!

Wow! fantastic follow through on a wacky and nerve-racking time constraint at the airport. In Joe Swenson’s JUSTIN TIME the puns keep coming and Monty-Pythonesque absurdity soars like a 747. I love the talking-into-the-watch routine best!

Who hasn’t felt for Sisyphus on one of those days of futile repetition? SISYPHUS’S INTERVIEW - his career placement talk in Hell - is a hilarious nugget of satire. Don’t want to spoil things by revealing all that moved me up and down the hill, but this is erudite (Malebolge translated from Italian means “evil ditches”)and great fun!

I like the line from Mike: “I have a pretty good idea of who I was, even if I don’t remember.” This play is about re-building a high-school past between 2 people, not a conflict of opposites, but a construction of a former pivotal relationship. I love Alyssa’s memory of the conversation on the hill, about what went down from there. THE GRAPE NERDS REUNION is a warm human play about two very different people connecting. It gives me hope that you don’t have to be just like someone or categorically in the same place to matter.

A terrific character study! I love the different motivations that the three men have for believing in and tracking Big Foot, mostly because their competing voices are something we can hear in our own heads. And it’s great that when the plot makes a hairpin turn, how consistent Brody, Trip, and Cal are to their individual good-buddy orientations. PROOF OF MONSTERS, as Ruben Carbajal’s title brilliantly suggests, is as much about what’s inside than it is about outside and that's exciting!

The comedic timing of Duncan Pflaster's MINE OR YOURS is impressive. I just love how this play progresses as the hunted becomes the hunter, or something like that, in this gay and straight singles bar spoof. Philip from Arkansas both confirms and defies expectations. The peak of hilarity for me is the moment when barkeep Polly quotes Prospero: "O brave new world that hath such people in't." The last two pages are pure joy as the once predatory Patricia and Paul are racked with indecision. Would love to see this on stage!

There’s something of Beckett that seems at work in DELETE, especially in the way the unexplained gunshot stage directions instigate the action, and yet it’s the variation on the sleep-walking words of Lady Macbeth (“What’s done cannot be undone”) in Jacquelyn Priskorn’s purgatory drama that seems to hold it together in a place somewhere between office speak and demonology, between IT and It. I love it that there are both mistakes we brought on ourselves and mistakes that are done to us and that both are ambiguously consequential. Fine work from a fascinating playwright.

THE ROTARY PHONE is a techno generational gap comedy and big urban archeological fun. I love the patience Martineau shows in detailing how these three cousins from the mid-21st century would approach and learn to use a rotary phone! The appearance of Ruth is magical. As a being from 2022, I really enjoyed being stuck in the middle of this wild and creative premise.

In AFTER THE GARDEN, Adam proposes a trial separation with Eve that seems doomed (like the marriage breakup in the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) because he hasn't fully thought through all his marriage has going for it. Like love and blintzes. Really admire how insightfully Claudia Haus explores her premise of a 300 year-old post-Eden marriage, especially the kind words from the snake. Here's hoping they make it another century or two.