Recommended by Charles Scott Jones

It’s very difficult to write a fresh scene involving a bad pickup scenario. With PICKUP, Marj O’Neill Butler has done it brilliantly through the use of humorous and telling names and a twisty dueling repartee. As a playwright I admire the character Paulette’s use of jump retorts to keep Peebles off balance. She’s always one step ahead of the falsely self-assured doofus. The timing of the actors would be everything in this wonderful piece and I’d love to see it staged.

The use of sound in this audio play is superb. DEAD OF WINTER by Brent Alles is full of dread and snow-crunching steps of horror and a kind of pathos for all three characters involved in the gut-wrenching triangle they form one cold night in Northern Michigan. I love the very specific setting and that the footprints in the snow aren't quite human anymore. This one will keep you thinking macabre thoughts late into the night because of its deep emotional resonances.

Think beat poetry or the use of language Ginsberg drew from Walt Whitman as a means for accessing THE LONG WALK by A. A. Gardner - a disturbing, dark opalescent, and profound two-hander - that magnifies to very large effect Ray's feelings - in his best friend Leo's Volvo after being bailed out once again - as Ray slowly sobers to the clear and irrefutable fact of his abysmal existence. I'm a sucker for hard-earned reckonings from nights of debauchery in St. Louis and this one thrilled my nostalgia to the max.

CREATOR'S DILEMMA by Adam Richter is a clever and updated feminist take on the Pygmalion - Galatea myth. Rather than sculptor, Doctor Jay is a mad scientist of Dr. Frankenstein's ilk, but with romantic designs on his creation Senara. (She can help him host parties and go on walks with him.) But he has competition from Gretl, one of the villagers who knew Senara as unrequited love Belinda. The infusion of song lyrics from the Brandi Carlile album "The Story" is inspired - especially the line "I was made for you." Read this play for the way it unwinds.

The battle to resist unhealthy food rages on inside so many of us. Arianna Rose in DON’T PLAY WITH YOUR FOOD makes poor eating a poignant and hilarious food fight. Personifying cravings that hearken back to our childhoods. Can Mighty Casey stand up to the edible charisma of her house guests - Cookie, Ice Cream, and Chip? Is Super Kale a realistic answer or a fantasy of cruciferous satisfaction? It’s the time of year when resolve is beginning to wane and the battle rages on. Fine work from a gifted playwright.

So glad to have read RESPECT THE NOSE by Monica Cross for its wonderful articulation of what goes into clowning. Any artist who helps us understand what we once knew of the world as children and have since forgotten should be celebrated and - if you haven’t already - this monologue is a fine play to start!

“Why is everybody so bitey tonight?” asks Candace in THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT by John Busser. This late night at the fast-food joint is a riot of hilarious zombie references. I admire manager Slotnick’s futile attempt to maintain some kind of order as all hell breaks loose and his existence gets swallowed up by the kind of horror movie tropes we all know and love. Hilarious work, as always from Busser - who closes the Meat Shack with the best line - explaining once and for all why zombies don’t talk.

Plays seldom do justice to the painterly life but IMPRESSIONS OF PARIS by Nora Louise Syran is an immersive wonder of art history, period song and dance, and lucid conversations between French Impressionists. I admire the positioning of the play’s very lovable and fabulous painter-hero Suzanne Valadon on the outskirts of relevance (beginning as a child drawing on the sidewalk) and her coming within the orbits of legends (Cassatt, Morisot, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec). And I'm in awe of NLS for everything that went into this sensually majestic theatrical composition and would thrill to behold it staged.

This is a fine time-travel one act - with a title that welcomes aboard the uninitiated into the numerological significance of 11:11. I think what I admire most about James Perry’s play is how the complex temporal jitterbugging somehow magically fits perfectly the angst and humor and terror of our times as Sean and Will experience it in jolts. The use of the Marvel movies and the high-carb travel machine are inspired, reminding me of the work of Philip K Dick. And you do feel for Sean and Will, so helplessly captive within their own inventiveness. Inspired work!

This is funny!! It's even funnier if you've plowed through Melville's tome waiting and waiting and waiting for the action but taking kind of a perverse pleasure in the endless whaling rants. I was laughing the whole minute of Adam Richter's LONG STORY SHORT.