Recommended by Charles Scott Jones

This monologue brings that day, that time, all back so well for its temporal complexity and for what the playwright leaves out as much as for what she puts in. I've never heard 9/11 talked about so poignantly, without the melodrama, yet with the all-permeating long term effect of that day carried now inside the speaker's children. The three paragraphs are like stanzas in a prose poem that move from the past to the future and leave me wondering what the next 20 years will bring. Haunting beautiful work.

Wow - this is such a seamless gorgeously-constructed dialogic piece! THE SADNESS OF JOHNNY DEPP is that rare ten-minute play that when I finished reading I scrolled back and started reading again. I love how the tension and the emotional movement comes in waves from the perfectly realized utterances of She and They. The ocean feels like a character pushing them to enter, to resist. My tendency is to care deeply about thought-provoking drama, but I care for THE SADNESS because it's a feeling I can't fathom in any intellectual way but will live with on and on.

Ha-Ha-Ha! All time great, hilarious euphemism play. John Busser in his QUENTIN TARANTINO'S PG-13 CRIME MOVIE keeps coming at ya with the wordplay. This would be a blast for actors playing Quentin, Samuel, and Daniel Day-Lewis and the steady barrage of poking the Mouse is a sure bet to moose-fudge the audience, maybe even win over some of the non-cussing Mouse zealots. "But it plays into the whole plumbing thing!" A favorite line of many. Busser has great talent for sustaining a joke and taking it to a new, even more preposterous level than you thought possible.

"Please stop talking about me like I'm not here." My favorite line in EATING IN THE DARK comes from Stomach, the personification of a woman's abdomen who binges snack bar food at a movie theater. Debbie Lamedman in ten minutes gives us a deceptively high stakes tragicomedy that disturbs as it makes us knowingly smile. How much are we all controlled by our warped urges for sustenance? A great idea that speaks to the times we're living in, but I've got to go - there's something my stomach wants to check on in the fridge.

What we have here is a highly successful curiosity play. How long can playwright Jolly realistically sustain men talking at the urinal of a restaurant bathroom? (Men's rooms are notoriously silent places.) Turns out there's easily ten minutes of small or large talk - depending on your POV. The conversation is so fluid, it makes one imagine beer is involved. I admire that the humor comes out of the four unnamed characters' personalities - that there is no stock bathroom humor - instead something serious - the loneliness of men for each others' company. So kudos for this magic act!

Love how this park-bench play unfolds so naturally, so gracefully, so uneventfully that all the emphasis goes into the two characters having a conversation. BABY STEPS stages the kind of talking that happens less and less, a chance encounter between two different people. The play goes nowhere and everywhere, the focus is as broad as world history and the future of the planet, and as small as singing "California Dreamin' " on a Hell's Kitchen bench, yet Caridad Svich never oversteps the bounds she so artfully establishes. The title fits the play's resolution and the playwright's magical use of dialogue.

Jack Levine pulls off this funny and wise fable about Writer's Block - in such a way that it's not only entertaining, it may actually help other stuck writers. With animal actors - a monkey and a horse -as collaborators and co-brainstormers - this mindset just might work to get past our inner self-editor that kills first drafts before they come to life. After all creative writing wrests upon a horse-like steadiness, a being that has faith in the destination - and monkey-like spontaneity, divergences from the norm. IT'S REALLY VERY SIMPLE balances seriousness and hilarity and inspires happy writing.

Ah Hah! A classic Hollywood premise that Feriend takes to new heights! - wonderfully witty and realistic couple-speak that makes Evan's suspicion fun. I really like how Megan comes off as smart enough (to have her cake and eat it too) for the play to have just about any ending. (Think the first ending works best!)

All right, I had to know who you meet - so enticing title and the one-minute play lives up to it - don't want to say too much. (Okay, can't help saying I love the hidden joke that some or maybe all of the people are famously long-winded, but what we get is sixty seconds of pure Heaven!)

I admire how the tone, pace, theme, and characterizations all work together in DARK MATTER - to create a unified effect - as if a future drug were taking hold of you the reader just as it has with the happy Palmer. The ornate and somehow familiar nicknames he has for Marion are delightful and eerie as well. Donald Loftus makes perfect use of a vision of the future that draws from the past, something old and something new, as we float through an ingenious, disturbing simulacrum that begins to feel way too close to home and then it's over.