Recommended by Steven G. Martin

B. E. Turner's "Timbuktu" is the script in your short play festival that will delight, infuriate, confound, and thrill your audience. Some may cheer, some may roll their eyes, but it will leave an impact. It's a gift to actors, designers, and directors, and an inspiration for playwrights.

Simply, it's the story of a meal gone wrong (or gone well, depending on perspective). On another level, it is a gloriously self-aware example of and about irreal writing, filled with an underlying chaos and a comic rejection of reality. On another level, it's a chocolate souffle.

In "Capacity for Curiosity," we see the breath of life given just before the recipient is tossed into the deepest part of the ocean without learning to swim.

Pastor's play is my favorite kind of science fiction, showing what it means to be human. In this case, ambitious, cruel, and calculating. We feel for the robots in the script -- they have names, strong connections with others, and the most varied emotions throughout. Pastor uses structure, irony, and dialogue well.

Sickles writes about a relationship that breaks up for reasons beyond melodramatic ones, reasons that are subtler and more nuanced and human. They make "The Most Important Meal of the Day" more thought-provoking and emotionally powerful than other break-up plays.

But mature and grown-up don't equal staid and boring. There is plenty of drama in "The Most Important Meal of the Day" -- there are tactics and reversals of power aplenty. And -- while we get more about Linus's history than Rupert's -- there are dimensional characters to ground this multi-dimensional story.

No one is just a dumb, silent ogre. No one is just a rage-filled harpy. Not if they're created by Scott Sickles, who uses structure, direct address, irony, and image-laden dialogue to show audiences the depths of these characters' lives.

"Bulletproof Love" is a feast for actors willing to expose themselves and share emotions as raw and cruel and tender and beautiful as these. And audiences will be shaken.

Hopson irreversibly establishes an unnerving tone from the start of "The Delivery Man"; it never lets up. Actors will love the dialogue and actions, and there are visual and aural elements to push the conflict even further.

Brisbane's one-act play is a marvelous concoction of reportage, criticism, pulp biography, and vaudeville theatricality. "Phyllis Schlafly And The Imaginary Television Show" also is a play of emotions: rage, disgust, and contempt for its subject. It's a wonderful read, and it would be audacious to stage.

This play is more than its concept, although the concept is highly theatrical and perfect for the stage: the conflict of Man versus Self played out as Man versus Man. No, "Baggage Handlers" is much more than its concept as Vovos' use of structure, action, and irony leads an audience to care about all the characters and their plights.

Tristan B Willis crushes stupidity, insensitivity, banality, and mediocrity in this micro-short play/performance piece. All the more credit to Willis for not giving those 23 moronic opinions any time in the script, either -- although an audience will infer most because of the specificity of the lines. This is pure response & reply.

Vovos has written a terrific historical play in "Delivery," set in one of the northernmost stations of the Underground Railroad.

Vovos doesn't focus of the minutiae of the time and place, or the details about how the reality of the situation came to be. Instead, he focuses on people who are forced to live in that time and place, their history, and their goals. As a result, emotional connections are at the forefront. Actors, directors, audiences will love "Delivery" on stage.

Lynett employs marvelous naturalistic dialogue in "In Transit." The audience understands so much about Becca, Ryan, and their emotions by what is said, unsaid, glossed over, and even abandoned mid-sentence. Add precise actions that showcase character, and you've got a wonderful short play that actors and directors would love to put on stage.