Recommended by Scott Sickles

Oh how I relished reading this aloud!
Sometimes fictional Schadenfreude is even better than the real thing, especially because the real thing takes so long.

Not here.

It’s a short monologue with a deliciously deliberate buildup. Lawing skillfully shows you his cards at just the right moment, evoking a sense of inevitability that might have been dread if the parties involved were different people.

But they are who they are. And proudly so.

The piece ever so matter-of-factly, even coldly reaches its climax, but the emotional disengagement is not only earned... it’s a reward.

Like I said: delicious.

A dizzyingly hilarious manic monologue for a female actor with magnificent comic timing and equally impressive breath control! Speckman expertly parses out information to paint an increasingly funny picture of a bad moment handled very poorly before plummeting downhill! Tremendous fun! Read it aloud!!!

Also I’m guessing... Bouvier des Flandres!

I shall let that sentence hang there cryptically.

I’ve never liked baseball. However, when forced to watch, I did love keeping score! I guess the whole “transcribing a narrative in a code of shapes and numbers” thing appealed to me.

Put the game and the scorekeeping together, and you’ve got yourself a baseball story! And those can be quite compelling. The inherent dichotomy between the physical and the cerebral makes for excellent drama, and this play is no exception. The family squabbling rings as true as a nerdy kid’s dread at batting practice. It’s a great tribute to how complex traditions bridge familial chasms.

Big Ideas in plays are best seen though an intimate lens. These days, what’s more intimate than a text conversation? It’s just you, them, your history, and your future, from the next letter you type to the fate your relationship. Or, when it’s between God and the Devil, the fate of humanity.

With these two, human suffering is used to score ideological and literal points. Ultimately, their complex, heartfelt friendship bears the weight of love and need both human and divine. In Weaver’s lovely text message play, God AND the Devil are in the details.

Family is chaos! Marriage is negotiation! Parenthood is war!

Goldstein masterfully juggles the humor, conflict, and wild fragility in Joyce and Nina’s respective homes. They’re each other’s refuges... and do they ever need to escape! While Nina is married to a good man, their daughter is a handful, and still there’s something missing. Joyce however is in a toxic a marriage that’s figuratively paralyzing with a husband who’s literally sedating her.

The central friendship delicate and beautiful, revealing sharp edges as it begins to crack.

A wholly moving and entertaining family saga.

If you’re looking for a play with a towering role for an older male actor, Abraham Mendel is the Willy Loman of Jewish septuagenarians, an American Lear.

In this perfectly family drama, memories of the past collide with changing values and immediate needs. The drawback to raising strong independent children is that they have minds of their own, yet their willfulness is both fueled and tempered by how parents forge their hearts. Disappointment wages a war with love in the Mendel household and there are casualties.

Disclosure: I produced the 2009 developmental production at WorkShop Theater Company .

I highly recommend reading this around with English accents! The raw elegance of the language almost requires it.

Yancey provides a fresh take on Orpheus as a son bargains for passage to the Underworld to bring back his father. The dialogue is jaunty and the negotiations clever. The use of a choir enhances the classical feel of the proceedings.

Most importantly, there's so much love, regret, and forgiveness between father and son, the reader can easily envision the richness of their life together and the magnitude of its loss. There's also a mythical inevitability that intensifies the suspense. Terrific piece!

When I first saw the ocean of names on the cover of the May 25, 2020, edition of the New York Times, accompanied by brief tributes and descriptions, one phrase struck me harder than the others: "continued on page 12."

Here was an itemized carnage of one percent of casualties in small pitch type and still... we needed the rented refrigerator truck of Page 12.

At that moment, I couldn't breathe.

Speckman's monologue inspired by those same words is calm and measured, like the one rational person in an emergency room after a pileup.

It gave me back my breath.

There's a special helplessness artists feel after a crisis. They want to stop the bleeding, remove the bullet, say the right words... to do something that MATTERS, and somehow "I made art" just doesn't cut it. Even though it's heartfelt and, in its way, the most intimate form of respect, it just feels dumb and, worse, it might be bad!

Miller perfectly illustrates this socio-creative paralysis, pitting talent and intention against bureaucracy, while creating a compassionate and deeply human portrait of the power art has to heal the afflicted, the artist, and even the professionally distanced public official. Stirring!

An accusation pushes a marriage to the brink! Sudden revelations create seismic shifts in the power dynamic until action must be taken! A fun one-pager with a coulple nice twists! A hoot!