Recommended by Steven G. Martin

"Advice for Women" is brilliant satire that will make audiences laugh and think, question and guffaw.

Rubinstein excels at dialogue, characterization, theatricality, action, structure, and visuals (yes, the slideshow she outlines is laugh out loud funny!). She also is a skilled critic who takes aim at multiple targets and hits the bull's-eye: lack of respect for women and everyday challenges they face, pandering attitudes of the out-of-touch-with-reality People in Power, and our culture of violence.

Read this play, yes. Better yet, produce it.

This is a generous, humane, multi-generation play. It's well-crafted with elegant passages of time, specificity of character, trust in an audience's intelligence to make inferences, and its structure -- those days at a time that link together and create new understanding and connections for Vic and Mr. Van.

It is obvious McBurnette-Andronicos loved every minute of creating "Sock Puppet Fetish Noir." There is a wealth of richly absurd moments in her dialogue, actions, and stage directions that are made even funnier by having a sock puppet as one of the leads.

This short play bursts at the seams with ideas, themes, and conflicts.

It's about responsibility.
It's about innocence and anger.
It's the first loss of trust.
It's about complacency and future generations railing against that complacency.

"Reading Babar in 2070" shows a future that we seem hurtling toward without much concern.

Carabatsos must have siblings. She strikes all the right chords of a relationship between sister and brother: shared memories from decades previous, brutal honesty and judgement of each other's lives in the spirit of familial love, jealousy, and shorthand dialogue to cause pain or create camaraderie. The strength of this play lies in the careful details Carabatsos provides to create two willful characters in a nod-your-head-in-recognition relationship.

"Truth." is open, honest, and potentially heartbreaking.

The world of "Truth." begins balanced as Femia creates such ease between Lily and Rosie through dialogue and action. Then new information is shared from one side, then more, and more ... until Lily and Rosie are off-balance because their relationship has shifted.

I had the pleasure of attending a staged reading of "Second Death of a Mad Wife" May 14, 2019, at Civic Theatre of Greater Lafayette in Lafayette, Indiana.

The script showcases McBurnette-Andronicos' exceptional skills at world building through her research into historic personalities and events; establishing a claustrophobic, uneasy atmosphere; and creating a character-driven mystery that doesn't offer pat answers. I look forward to attending a full production of this play -- it offers a complicated and satisfying night of theatre.

This drama about a family caught in the midst of the opioid addiction epidemic pulses with theatricality -- multiple overlapping narratives, time jumps, direct address, non-fiction reportage, situational and character irony, the use of movement -- that culminates with a harrowing image of people left agonizing with doubt, guilt, grief, anger, questions, and pain.

There are no pat solutions, only more questions, which makes Goldman-Sherman's play more harrowing and nearly unbearable. Unforgettable theatre.

This wonderful short play sets three characters who desperately need one another on a collision course. "Angel of Hope" is a play about the journey -- an audience may guess what the ending will be, but they also will feel compelled by the actresses playing Clarissa, Teebo, and Hope to find out how the ending comes about.

Tanuja Devi Jagernauth treats audiences and actresses alike to eye-bulging theatricality with her short play "Skin." There's gallows humor a-plenty mixed with a strong dose of fight choreography and symbolism. Yet the family's power dynamic, the foundation for Jagernauth's marvelous action & characters, makes it wholly relatable for audiences.