Recommended by Scott Sickles

A glorious piece for mature actors! No matter how well you know someone, sometimes the non-verbal cues and the subtle verbal hints aren't good enough. You have to resort to double (almost single) entendres peppered with good old fashioned kvetching just so you both remember who you are! But who you were, where you've been, and what you've done, even after a very long time, are still only the foundations for everything that's to... well... come. A joy!

As ever, Asher Wyndham creates an honest, accurate, and complex portrait of a unique yet universal child. The are some days when we're just not in the mood to touch people and be touched by them. But for kids, adults use circumstances to dictate their children's physical boundaries, and sometimes it's too much to ask. I want to cheer Cris on for setting those boundaries like a rational, intelligent, yet still emotional young person who is doing their best not to let the situation get the best of or get away from them. There's a lovely lesson here.

DELIGHTFUL!!!
I don't want to say too much because I want you to be as joyfully surprised as I was! Suffice it to say, Haas has drawn three beautifully delineated characters and put them in a classic monster movie/disaster film trope wrapped up in a Christmas confection! The stakes are high, the monster is both fierce and adorable, the ornaments are lovely and loveable. A perfect holiday play!

I feel called out. In more ways than one. I feel as though these two characters each represent aspects of myself, not just any aspects but "areas of concern," and that the off-stage character in 14B is my true avatar in this Carnesian universe, which is disconcerting as I now see myself as an off-stage character being called out by on-stage characters representing some of my more aggressive personality flaws.

Yet, I enjoyed the play immensely even while it was indicting me, though I'm not sure I understood it, which, given the genre, is probably preferable. I had fun!

Relentlessly clever, funny, surprising and deep, it challenges ones preconceptions about Hamlet, racial and sexual identity, and even the human condition all in a very short period of time! A mini-masterpiece!

A portrayal of the high school caste system that's as traumatizing as it is concise, the play actually depicts the entitlement, oppressiveness, and inherent hypocrisy of "mean girl" culture with the Jennifers' casual abuse and victimization of their friend and co-cheerleader, Peter.

A male cheerleader is a great archetype for this piece as boy cheerleaders are usually good looking and must be athletic and very physically strong while fulfilling a traditionally "female" job. Yet here he is defenseless against the verbal onslaught. Peter's sweet introversion engenders a sweet, elegant sympathy. The play is a great study in social contrast.

If poetry were a scalpel and bullying – not just the action but the entire anthropological ecosystem: predator, prey, onlookers, environment, all of it – were a living, breathing organism, then this play would be its vivisection.

Through rapid-fire expressionism, Hageman manifests an all-too-real and all-too-familiar hellscape, allowing us intimate access to each child's sense of terror and powerlessness and how they combat it. But this is no after school special where the bully reveals his loneliness and everyone reaches an understandimg. This is one day of battle in an long cyclical war.

I didn't breathe for 18 pages.

Vivid, dark and sumptuously creepy tale. An innocent boy verging on adolescence and a sly sensuous temptress: is it a youthful male fantasy gone haywire, an allegory about the dangers of temptation, a disturbing caution about predators, or all or none of the above? Up to you. What's definite is that it's an unsettling and gripping scenario that's even more dangerous as a realistic story then as a supernatural one.

Dank, claustrophobic, relentlessly creepy… A harrowing take on masculine arrogance and its expectations/underestimation of the feminine. The audience knows this dude is in trouble way before he does... and therein lies the suspense.

I love a play that dares to leave the stage empty of actors (even briefly) and the audience at the mercy of what we hear in the dark. There's a generosity and trust in the writing that capitalizes on our imaginations.

Much like its monster, the play toys with you, traps you, and doesn't let go.

[recommendation based on the 2019 Nylon Fusion production]

A simple, concise, sublime one-minute masterpiece from Steven G. Martin. The circumstances speak for themselves: who these women are, the era they live in, everything that is at stake, all in this one minute of time. Understated yet clear, and tremendously powerful.