Recommended by Scott Sickles

At the intersection of "Where I Live" and "Where It Hit Me" lies this play! Gay men in mid life – one who stayed in the hometown and another who left – with a history both finished and unfinished... BLACKOUT WEDNESDAY reads like torn-out pages of our diaries.

Bavoso expertly and actively lays out a lifetime of history filled with starcrossed ideals and missed opportunities. The play illuminates a crossection of America where family and geography aren't choices unless you force them to be. I feel like I know these guys and they pierce my heart.

So often, characters who are bad liars can torpedo a play. There's no reason to believe them yet everyone seems to and it makes no sense. Fortunately, Mabey's characters aren't just bad liars... They're TERRIBLE!!! But once caught, the recovery effort is hilariously beautiful!!! It's rare to see someone jump through their own hoops with such verve in order to let others down easy... and still have it land like an anvil!

THE END... it's a heightened version of what many of us have thought in a Zoom call. Relentlessly funny with great characters and a great twist!

A succulent doggie treat of a play, MUTTS is a joyous one-shot celebration of our collective humanity! Woof! Ruff! And BowWow!!!

CARPE DENIM asks an important question: how do you sell bluejeans to a polarized nation? I'm not kidding. And neither is David Simpatico. American Jeans is a stand-in for every corporation. His searing satire takes no prisoners. While thoroughly dissecting the nation's reaction to BLM protests, the play excoriates the free market's attempts to capitalize on the violence and unrest to retain business on every side of the political spectrum. Ultimately, the only color that matters isn't black, white, or blue... it's green.

Universally resonant and a product of its time, Hayet’s lovely Zoom play provides hope in an era of isolation. Stranded on the ISS, two years after she even heard a human voice, protagonist Jessica uses music as a mental/emotional salve and a call to others. It works! Keeping his characters an atmosphere apart, Hayet skillfully builds a love story, platonic and/or romantic, by keeping their conversation upbeat as they overcome the distance. It’s a gentle tale in the starkest of environments with terrific roles for female actors and tremendous staging potential online or onstage!

BEHOLD! THE PLAYWRIGHT’S PSYCHE LAID BARE FOR ALL TO SEE!!!

On some level, this play is about every rejection. All of them. We view them all as cosmic, demonic conspiracies because WHAT OTHER EXPLANATION IS THERE???

Often we only view our losses through the lens of those who were celebrated instead: as tiny creatures of profound insigificance. That this rejected piece is one-page-long heightens the humilation because at least 50 to 60 plays BY OTHER PEOPLE did get accpted!

At least we’re not alone, right? Well...
Mabey has an answer for that too.

Hilarous. Painful. Honest.

Sometimes the lifelong turmoil of the parent-child relationship can be summed up with a one-word answer to a simple question. The buildup to this succinct Q&A provides a clear truth, yet there’s suspense in wondering how honest the reply will be, and the foreboding sense that the conversation and the relationship are far from over. Resonant and powerful, especially if you've been there.

Floyd-Priskorn tackles the age-old and eternal problem of the media's fat shaming and takes to task not only how it disrespects bodies it considers imperfect and the individual people in them, but also how it tries to misrepresent what a "fat" body is.

The play also pulls no punches in depicting the gleeful sadism behind the table when casting women.

Fortunately, protagonist Celia is not the type to burst into tears when someone looks her up and down then side-to-side. She's a force to be reckoned with, as defiantly honest as the play she's in!

When it started, I thought the act of eating crayons was meant as a metaphor for something else: alienation, artistic repression, the idiosyncratic identities of everyday iconoclasts...

NOPE! This is an ode to kids who eat colored wax drawing implements! And it is beautiful!

It just so happens that the characters themselves, who are so vividly real the play could have be reconstructed from interview transcripts, happen to be idiosyncratic everyday iconoclasts.

Why they did what they did and the extent to which they did it speaks to the oddball in each of us. The Chorus is also PRICELESS!...

There's something a little off right from the get-go...

The conversation is a little too heightened, a little too expressionistic, a little too rhythmic with its facts and arguments and counterarguments and questions...

And it builds...

One might even think it's the play that's off, that the writing is stilted or forced or just a bit much...

And that's the beauty of it.

Levine plays the long game with these characters. The idiosyncratic setup leads to a series of satisfying payoffs, one after the other.

Great fun for actors and audience!