Recommended by Scott Sickles

From its swoonworthy opening line to its final moments as the dusk sky goes dark, Dudley weaves a gentle, exquisitely detailed love story between two teenage boys who have no idea what they're doing, but know exactly how they feel. The sense of place is as palpable as their longing. The use of local folklore enhances the atmosphere and the emotion. One gets a feel for the boys' individual lives, what they face at home and in the world, and the refuge they provide each other. And now, my heart is at the bottom of a bog in Scotland.

Closets are great places to keep things you're not using, but you wouldn't want to live in one. There are many kinds. Goldman-Sherman gives her protagonist one that never quite closes, but doesn't open all the way either.

The monologue examines the perils of being pretty (it's not all its cracked up to be), passing for straight (ditto), and how coming out is vastly different on paper than in practice. Margaret's circumstances and her perceptions of them are as complex as the people trapped within them. It's a relationship mine field and she's tiptoeing on a trigger wire. Breathtaking.

What a joy Sister Agatha is!

There are members of the Catholic clergy who actually live by the teachings of Christ and love their neighbors. Agatha is one of them. She's just the nun William needs as he faces a terrible crisis that's left him dangerously adrift.

Both characters are beautifully drawn. William's love, pain, and loss are realistic, complex, and achingly vivid. While the play's tension comes from a loving place, its resolutions are still hard-won.

A terrific two-hander that can restore your faith in good people.

VET YOUR HOUSEGUESTS!

Carnes's fun political satire is a great spin on the Dysfunctional Family Thanksgiving Dinner Play. Set in a home in a gated community, two seemingly like-minded couples come together, ultimately revealing very different fears about the world.

The overt politics work because it's Thanksgiving and the (mis)treatment of youthful idealism is frustratingly real. The dialogue moves at a breakneck speed as the neighborly dynamics become more and more twisted.

A great snapshot of our times and the colliding opinions we have maneuver around.

Break my heart, Lee Lawing! Just smash it to pieces, why don't you?

A masterful memory play, THE KISS looks at lost love, lost memories, along with yearning and regret that stretches across oceans of time. Masterfully structured with memories folding in on one other as narrators immerse themselves into their pasts, as themselves and others, speaking all the things they should have said but didn't, couldn't, or did but the other person wasn't ready to hear.

It's a tiny epic. And it wrecks me.

This play is an ode to everyone who ever wanted someone they couldn't have... even when that someone wanted them back SO BAD! When there are very good reasons you can't be together. And those reasons just... vanish.

Gonzalez creates two passionate paradoxical characters: strong, self-possessed, deeply passionate. Yet from the outset, there's a fragility that goes beyond their interdependence. They are somehow titans of glass.

But breakable things often bend. The atmosphere is palpable as the sense of foreboding, inescapable tragedy. We want for them, *with* them, and so we follow them into their abyss.

EGYPT reaches unheard of depths of narrative intimacy as its narrator Intuits and reveals the fate of her surroundings, namely the body of the mother carrying her.

We live in a country – nay, a world – where women are treated as disposable. Where the violence wrought against them is tolerated, fetishized, and encouraged. O’Grady puts the reader/listener in the middle of that terror, elegantly – even dispassionately –bridging the gap between two victims of the same crime.

EGYPT and Egypt will live on within us. Our hearts and minds are her sarcophagus. She will not be forgotten.

Lam’s one-pager is a perfect snapshot of how many of us reacted to the shootings of six Asian women in Georgia. There’s a level of detachment where one has to look up the facts only to not be surprised by them. The rage comes on page two. This depicts what happens in between the incident and it sinking in. And as the title states, it’s not about this one event; it’s about damn near anything in this country.

What starts out as a glorious celebration of art/museum nerdom, representing both appreciative patrons and artistic technicians, elevates into an experience of transcendence and beauty. It's impossible not to get carried away, or rather be taken, by both Sylvia and Haas.

Simple to produce. The economy of the writing is miraculous given the emotional punch it achieves in a few quick pages. Another great entry in Haas's States Collection.

There is a time and a place for detailed literary analysis and maid of honor Wendy has found it!!! So few understand Shakespeare yet so many express their sentiments with what they think his words mean. It’s heroes like Wendy, setting the record straight before it’s too late, who deserve appreciation they will never get from those who owe it to them the most. Would you want “to be or not to be“ or “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow“ recited at your reception! I should hope not! Wendy is here to see that you don’t! BRAVO!