Recommended by Scott Sickles

A delightful and true-voiced power struggle between a proudly unorthodox girl and a mother desperate for her to be normal! A Halloween declaration of individuality becomes downright creepy and super convincing as our heroine bucks convention, revealing her happily dark side.

Some plays you don't just watch. They immerse you in their world. It's not even like seeing a movie. You're with the characters, standing where they're standing, breathing their air, smelling their afternoon. You're a neighbor and a witness. You may not know them but you're surviving alongside them.

In this play, a simple request is made: a woman asks for a keepsake. Unfortunately the keepsake is evidence, so no; but there is SO MUCH EVIDENCE because the crime was SO VIOLENT... what's one piece? Beautiful play with great roles, especially for an older actress. It should be done everywhere.

What do young people call it these days??? "All the feels!" That's it! This one gave me ALL THE FEELS!

What starts out as a series of gentle jokes about retirement communities (the shuttle to the Publix sounds like heaven to me, BTW) soon becomes an inventory of a long life spent together that has reached its sunset years, perhaps less gently than they would have preferred.

I'd say "great characters" but that may be a little narcissistic because at any given time I'm at least one of these men. :-)

A beautiful piece especially for mature actors.

DAMN! THANK YOU, RICHARD LYONS CONLON for having the bravery to tell this story. In real life, whether we want to admit it or not, not all tragedies are tragic. Sometimes they are a relief, or a release, or even justice. Conlon gives us a family at odds in a situation both clear and impossible. Somehow, it's set in a world that's both stark and miraculous. However you look at it, it's riveting. The exposition is active, concise and powerful. I don't know what it says about me, but I cheered and did a fist pump at the end! Bravo!

Once this play gets going, it dares you to breathe. Hell, it defies you to! Doing the Right Thing would be a no-brainer if it didn’t mean risking self-destruction in the process. Is possibly tanking a marriage and a life you’ve struggled to build worth saving a stranger who may or may not be in the danger you think they’re in??? The importance of self-care is weighed against the bravery required to come forward and suffer scrutiny, skepticism and being shamed over events from which there is never truly a complete recovery. An intense and indelible confrontation.

A joyful tribute to how the imaginary lives of children manifest in the real world... and how the real world manifests in the imaginations of children. The play simply and elegantly demonstrates the difference between how neurotypical and non-neurotypical kids (in this case, a boy with autism) process and share information. A delicate negotiation takes place with perception at odds with information, functioning as gentle metaphor for the state of American interpersonal communication. It's also a hopeful metaphor because messages are sent and received despite the obstacles that might prevent that. A confection that's deceptively rich.

Disclosure: I've dramaturged and directed (one staged reading, one workshop production) earlier drafts of this play.

A powerful, polarizing play that takes an unflinching look at the sexual entitlement passed down through generations of men (the titular inheritance). It also indicts the way women have traditionally been raised to revere masculine power. This combination of entitlement and reverence destroys the lives it touches, as Stewart's characters traverse a raw, starkly realistic, endlessly complex, multigenerational hellscape. Uncompromising and devastating.

Oh, my heart.
Two characters in separate timelines, each having half a conversation, yet it's a totally clear and cohesive piece. The connection between the two is strong and resonant. Each half is suspenseful and surprising in different ways, ultimately fusing together a lifetime's worth of emotion. Maybe two lifetimes. Tremendous. Very easy to produce.

Full Disclosure: I had the pleasure of being the house manager for the Off-Broadway production and it's one of my all-time favorite plays! I saw the whole play at least four times and would occasionally peek in to watch various scenes, especially the ending.

The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is brought out with tremendous vivacity and imagination. As fun as it is powerful.
But the story of the four schoolboys is also deeply impactful. I'd perceived the boy playing Romeo falling for the boy playing Juliet... who was just playing a role. (Other interpretations may differ.) Doubly devastating.

As far as short lifelong love stories go, the standard bearer, IMHO, is the opening of UP. Where that was all images, this piece is all words... and the images keep coming. A beautiful epistle with an extraordinary list of "adventures big and small," it was impossible not to get jealous of the adventures the speaker and Allen had together. So I got jealous. But in four double-spaced pages, we get the downs as well as the ups, the years apart and the years together. We get two glorious lives that, even in the end, were lucky beyond words.