Recommended by Scott Sickles

Every character truly is the hero of their own story. This maxim works on a few levels here in this wonderful take on theater, perspective, and the intricacies of causality. A lovey confection!

I have never wanted so badly to be a young performer, 10-13, as I do right at this moment. Not even when I was a young performer, 10-13.

ONION ODE is a deadpan masterpiece. Half the fun is reading it aloud with a straight face and a "school report" tone.

The "report" is as perfect in its willy-nilly organizational structure (I'm having flashbacks to fourth grade) as it is in providing a stealthily delightful comic escalation. It keeps paying off, for audience and performer, right up to the very, very... very end!

I would also kill to wear this costume.

I saw a staged reading of this play at the Carnegie Mellon Showcase of New Plays back in the 90s and it's never left me. Revisiting it now, I find it still timely and relevant, not to mention utterly riveting.

Sometimes the only thing worse than reading comments online is writing them. This delightful monologue sends up the frequent futility of online civility and the inability to resist taking a stand against dismissiveness, even when the substance of the so called discourse has gone by the wayside.

A lovely two-hander. While the play requires one male actor and one actor of any age, so long as they're contemporaries, I think it would be especially poignant with more mature actors. Regardless, the characters themselves have a wonderful chemistry.

Adam Richter takes a tried and true situation – "two strangers, initially adversarial, find common ground" – and builds on it with great charm, heart, and aplomb. Easy to produce. I hope it gets done everywhere.

Confession: I strive with great energy and aplomb for the boldness that J. Julian Christopher executes with apparent effortlessness. His writing fills me with a beautiful envy and admiration. Now, onward to this play.

This is the story of a wank.

To explain the pychosexual complexity in these very fast eight pages would be a difficult feat for Kinsey, Masters AND Johnson. Yet, these two people are painfully and deliciously real. They are both impervious and vulnerable, base and noble, confused and determined. Their relationship is a quiet mess even in this tiny, catastrophic, funny moment. Boldly intimate!

One side of a phone conversation that everyone with elderly parents has had at one time or another. And another. And another. And another! Viscerally real, the monologue creates a vivid picture of the speaker's surroundings while taking you through hairpin turns of subject and emotion. It fully captures the simultaneous need and impossibility to get off the phone with a parent who is themselves trying to navigate a confusing and frustrating world.

One side of a phone conversation that everyone with elderly parents has had at one time or another. And another. And another. And another! Viscerally real, the monologue creates a vivid picture of the speaker's surroundings while taking you through hairpin turns of subject and emotion. It fully captures the simultaneous need and impossibility to get off the phone with a parent who is themselves trying to navigate a confusing and frustrating world.

FABULOUS!!! A perfect depiction of misplaced bravado in the self-aggrandizing masculine fifth grader, giving the character just enough wisdom to actually make sense in his newly hormonal tween world, and filled with wonderful details that set the world of the play and the protagonist himself apart. A joy to read aloud. I'd love to see it performed.

And I swear I knew this kid in elementary school!

Warning! Whoever plays Eddie, or even just reads Eddie aloud, needs magnificent breath control! He speaks in amazing, stratospherically spiraling sentences of glorious neurosis and hairpin moods. The play itself is a spectacular man vs himself cacophony turned, to use the play’s language, affirmation. Ultimately, it is as beautiful as it is hilarious... and I had to put the damn thing down at least five times because I was laughing so hard. Wonderfully hysterical and hysterically wonderful!