Recommended by Scott Sickles

There is an ache in this play. A last grasp to connect with the person you've loved most in your life well after they've been lost forever.

There's also a beautiful frankness between the Old Man and Brian. If Brian didn't love him so much, he wouldn't be so mean... that snarky shorthand between mutually beloved people.

Brian's backstory is economically well-told: we know he died, unsightly, at 36 in Ronald Reagan's America. That says everything.

A gorgeous short play on its own, it's also a tremendous monument to a specific lost love and to lost love in general.

Bad teachers...

MR. IRRESISTIBLE is the other side of the coin to Romulus Linney's FM, one of my favorite short plays. But here something deeply insidious is happening.

This play functions well as a metaphor for government censorship of art, or as a manifestation of the struggle between individual creativity and societal expectation. But it works because in every practical sense it is about a puritanical abuse of power by an authority figure over a child. Goalpost are moved and standards are doubled. The audience feels Charlie's struggle and our hearts and rage go out to him.

Raw, bold, uncomfortably hilarious, and ultimately devastating. A realistic look at young soldiers wounded in combat (the language does not shy away) and the toll NOT dying can take on loved ones.

A MEMORY PLAY is this quintessential "if you could go back and change it" play because it dares to go back in time the only real way we know how, through the imagination. Kip literally tries to rewrite the mythology of his parents' wedding day in the hope that at least the fiction will work out better than the reality... once he stops the wedding! Playfully nodding to theatrical conventions and tropes, the piece also captures the playwriting process, especially the part when our characters start calling their own shots. A beautiful play about coming to terms. Eminem producible!

One of my favorite plays I've ever produced and one of my favorite plays EVER.

FABULOUS DARSHAN is a extraordinary chronicle of how wisdom, love, and the value of Living Your Life are passed down through three generations of gay men. The elder two, both black, have HIV. One prepares for the end with ferocity and Elegance while the other questions his commitment to stability over risk. The youngest, a white boy in his 20s, is a combination of recklessness and hope, callowness and adventure. Add a Hindu deity, and tons of wit and pathos, and you have a masterpiece.

A cacopho-symphony of Insta-speak; you can hear the constant uptalk and the nasal just reading it. It hits a great comic chord from the get-go, adds a touch of creepy isolation before paying off big time! It’s amazing that a play this short can “keep you guessing” but it does! For anyone who might be wondering if everyone is hanging out without them.

As someone who has watched every Oscar telecast since 1981, this really hits home! The magical overinvestment... sharing the evening with a naysayer with very different though not entirely invalid opinions... getting though the "ones nobody cares about" because the big awards are dream fuel. It's a lovely testament to how not just the Oscars but the entertainment industry touches us and provides a window from our lives - filled with bad grades, misguided expectations, and sleeping parents you don't want to wake - to a method of escape that extends beyond imagination and inspires us to reach.

There's a surprising amount to unpack here. (wink, wink)

It's starts off with just the kind of odd awkward cluelessness regarding gay interpersonal hookup communication skills, so it felt like the playwright already knew too much about me (just as you, dear reader, now do).

As the play goes on, it becomes a melange of sexy, sweet, earnest and macabre that had me laughing out loud often and wincing occasionally. (At one point, the words "oh no!" involuntarily escaped me.) It's a joyous story of connection!

It's hard to read a play when every word chips away at your heart a little more. Of course, when a play is busy doing that, it's impossible to stop.

This elegant short captures a multitude of turning points: the end of high school and the beginning of everything else; the last chance to say the thing you need to say and the genesis of the new world springing forth once those words irrevocably hit the air; the friendship as steadfast as it is ever changing.

By the end, it's sculpted you a brand new heart.

"Even people who are dead age." *clutches chest in heartbreak and awe*

A beautiful, melodic, deeply theatrical piece honoring the lies children need to hear and the truths we must all eventually accept, whether the story is told to us or about us.

A great script for comic actors to try their chops at heavier material, as BLUE requires the timing of Swiss clocks and the lightest, deftest touch to provide a spectacular punch.