Recommended by Scott Sickles

A gorgeous child’s-eye-view of palace intrigue, the circumstances made all the more horrific by the characters’ innocence. Cross lovingly portrays the relationship between two very young brothers in circumstances they can’t fully understand. It’s a great scene for child actors and a heartbreaking tale for adults.

It is certainly a love story line no other I've read. It's filled with surprises from the get-go and I don't want to give anything away. But I can say Cathro captures the yearning, longing, and hope of love that might somehow be requited even if it seems impossible.

It's a wonderful piece for a solo actor and an imaginative director and design team. The possibilities here are infinite, in both the staging and the romance!

Speaking as a Matthew Weaver aficionado and, most importantly, friend, I heartily endorse this endorsement of a man I know well by a man who’s never met him and who has not yet read his work but surely soon will.

This monologue is a lovely thing to say about anyone, especially a stranger. I look forward to the days when Prillaman reads Weaver and Weaver reads Prillaman, and the fact that that exchange of voices begins with this wonderful piece does my heart no end of good!

Even before the pandemic, friends and acquaintances were being made social media and sites like the NPX that introduce us to each other through our work. Many of us have encountered Spokane’s Favorite Son, Matthew Weaver, without ever having met him in person.

Here, Elizabeth Giffin Speckman embraces that distance and closes it with speculative philosophizing about the spaces we share, near and not-so-near misses, and the blithe connections humans have to one another that pass without our knowledge.

It’s a soulful hello to a friendly distant colleague; a smile and a wave on paper.

The truth is the truth.

Sometimes filling this 100-word box is hard.
We summarize to help make our point, but the summary rambles so we delete it and hope our praise still resonates without context.

We also don’t want to sound generic or repeat other recommendations so we skim them and edit ours.

Writing these recs is a PROCESS, not unlike writing a monologue or short play.

Sometimes, the word-counter tells you you have room, then you submit and it’s too long so you have to edit AGAIN.

Anyway, about the play...

Damn. I’m out of room.

"That’s the beauty of a play.
"It always takes place in the present."

Well, this play just took place in my present and now I feel like I gave and received a hug to and from Matthew Weaver! (Who I happen to be messaging right now! #multitasking)

This little valentine celebrating the friendship and support of the titular playwright, and the friendship and support playwrights can provide each other, is also a wonderful play on meta theatrical conventions and a testament to how we inspire one another.

I'm happier now than I was before I read it.
Wonderful!

Love stories involving autistic people are often "more about how hard it is to love an autistic person than how challenging it is to be an autistic person who wants to be loved." (Sarah Kurchak)

Osmundsen to the rescue!

Protagonist Henry has Asperger's and Osmundsen makes him appealing without softening his more challenging characteristics. Henry has rigid expectations about people, sex, and romance, but he allows himself to love and hurt like the 19th century heroines he worships.

LIGHT SWITCH has shades, colors, and complexity. Every character surprises. There's a heartfelt, painful honestly broadening Henry's world and ours.

Often all short fiction needs to capture is a turning point. We don’t need to know “why” or even all of “what.” We just need to know “WHAT NOW” and imagination fills the blanks.

Prillaman provides a cavalcade of turning points! Our heroines are relentlessly active – even when one is paralyzed, she’s still fighting. The atmosphere created by costumes and sound (and one prop...) grounds the piece in a terror that seems as casual as it is inescapable. What’s happening offstage is infinitely more horrifying than what’s happening onstage... until it isn’t.
A masterpiece!

Well, this was a little slice of fabulous. An elegant take on the adoption of mythologies been cultures and the fear of messengers to suffer due to delivering bad news. Civilizations rise and fall in the space of one page! Bravo!

I didn’t read the description before reading the piece aloud to myself, which I highly recommend. (Do the voices with subtle variations. That’ll give the piece the most respect.)

Carbajal’s variation on the metaphorical “life as one day” is filled with tremendous detail, heart, pathos, and beauty all on one page. Sublimely simple, yet utterly breathtaking. The last line was, for me, a poetic jaw-dropper.

I loved it so much, Ruben!

It’s a lifetime in one day in one minute.