Recommended by Scott Sickles

Wonderful! Sublimely elegant. A piece that captures what it's like to fall in love with a piece of art. Rinkel perfectly conjures the speaker's longing not only to know the subject of Copley's painting but also their own yearning.

A big grin on my face from start to finish. It's one thing to see a timeline in National Geographic or an exhibit at the natural history museum putting humanity's entire existence in perspective against the vastness of the universe, but Rinkel's 24-hour clock accomplishes the task with ease.

All long last, the "New York Minute" is quantified in concrete terms! Another great bit of banter by Larry Rinkel examining cultural minutia through a pragmatic lens, with great nuance and even a surprise or two.

Sometimes emphasis is everything! Sometimes it's timing. Tired time, it's both! A delightful verbal tennis match set to great music.

Starts out like expressionist drama, quickly morphs into comedy before revealing it was a horror story all along! All in one page!!! Anyone who remembers vinyl will identify!

A tiny theatrical paean to the complexities of unrequited, semi-requited, temporarily requited, and not-quite-requited love presended through a gentle expressionism and with more heart than a human body should be able to withstand.

Simply lovely.

Undeniably Weaver.

Sweet.
It gets a bad rap, often mistaken for saccharine, syrupy, something that rots the teeth.
What sweet is truly about is sufficiency; not constant but sudden, and fleeting. That first bite of pancakes or sip of coffee.
It offsets the sour and the bitter, like Smarties, making the experience savory.
As Jackie in this play says, "with my dying breath, I will defend'sweet'."
LOOK is a slow-motion tsunami of tenderness and understanding between a helper and one who needs help. The nudity is non-gratuitous, elegant, crucially intimate. The internal obstacle of insecurity is formidable. The play... sweet.

There’s a joke in the theatre: when the only object on stage is a lone park bench, the play must be about “Life with a Capital L!” Here the bench is at a train station, and life and death are neither metaphorical or theoretical. We have two characters on trajectories intersecting at the edge of despair: one approaching and the other who’s already been. Gonzalez’s poetry lies in the spirit of the prose, conveying its message of hope and beauty without being preachy. There’s no handwringng or melodrama, just honesty and connection. Perfect!

Partain takes Verne's most famous (and real) sea monster and puts it in the middle of your bougie friends' bougie vacation! The characters are nicely drawn; we would like them if we knew them in real life, and even if we didn't, we wouldn't wish THIS on them!

I love deep-sea documentaries, especially about the Mariana(s) Trench. Particularly resonant is how sturdy one's submersible must be; if the structure is compromised at all, you're "crushed like a tin can."

The humans vs nature conflict here is at best a two-front war that's over the moment it begins. Terrifically terrifying.

A confection of intellectual absurdism exploring the standards, implementation, and meaning of friendship, discourse and existence both quotidian and moment-to-moment. As one cat ponders the nature, purpose and consequences of the world in which it lives in order to stave off boredom, a fish lives for each moment, good or bad, with the gusto of a true innocent unencumbered by knowledge. It's also a hoot!