Recommended by Scott Sickles

“Don’t skip…!”

Being the working class sport-minded masculine father of an uncoordinated probably gay son presents its challenges. (I remember this well!) At least Rusty is trying. His batting average isn’t great but he keeps going up to the plate with his son Axl, less concerned about who his son is than about how the world will treat him. It’s heartening to see a backward parent take their first steps forward. Gearhart’s play brings attitudes and misconceptions up to date in a story that is as potentially brutal as it is ultimately gentle. A home run!

One of my greatest fears is that one day I simply won’t be able to write anymore. Because of an accident, a stroke, or one day I’ll just wake up and my raison d’etre will be suddenly foreign.

Eaton dramatizes this fear with elegance and humanity. Isabella, an iconic architect, survived an accident but the talent that defined her is gone. As she struggles to leave a legacy, her agent and her wife - both financially dependent upon her - take significant measures to adjust. A powerful account of how the disappearance of passion affects everyone involved.

What starts out as a fairly normal night of putting a toddler down for bed takes a troubling, intimate turn. What’s so effective about the conflict is that while the parents are at odds, no one is truly wrong. Hendricks deals with a sensitive and important subject with care and complexity. Audiences will empathize with these characters and care about them well after the play is over.

I don't always do well with heavily symbolic / avant-garde plays, but this play takes you by the hands, looks you in the eye, and says "trust me and I will show you the horrors and wonders of the world and the heart."

The visually poetic nonverbal animal storylines provide stirring counterpoint to a delicate, complex, human story, each grounding and elevating the other. Their converge is profound and literally catalysmic.

I saw a reading at the Valdez Theatre Conference with a full soundscape by Mike Vernusky. Extraordinary.

“The best way to get a man to go away is to have sex with him.”

I don’t know if that’s a quote or even a saying. But it’s freqently true.

But not always…

In this clever story of narrative archetyles hatching a sexual switcheroo, Blevins examines the ages-old trope while turning it on its head with unexpectedly real, deeply complicated people.

The tactic itself is legally referred to as Rape By Deception and it is a crime. Blevins is the first writer I’ve encoutered to point this out explictitly.

An essential play for many reasons!

“Is anybody out there?”

There are no good circumstances where that question is asked. It is inherently full of uncertainly and dread.

Kane fills her play with a beautiful, pervasive dread. There’s a simple question at its center: if you only feel like you exist in front of an audience, what happens when there’s no one left to watch you? While the play shines as a critiquce of influencer culture and the epidemic of narcissism it breeds, it also touches on the universal human fear of isolation.

Of having no one. In the world. Literally.

A bone-chiller.

The world needs more dads like this one: badasses who love their kids so unconditionally that it brands them; who understand a child so wildly different from they are that “opposite” doesn’t even cover it; who has to remind themselves that defending their child is a long term goal, so as to temper overly assertive yet utterly tempting short-term solutions.

We need more loving badasses.

We shouldn’t need them. We shouldn’t have to.

But we do.

Kudos to Deb Cole for commemorating one to paper for all of us to share!

When his Japanese American secret girlfriend Joyce is about to be shipped off to an internment camp, Bobby’s concerns can be summed up in three words, “What about me???” To be fair, he is a 17-year-old white boy in 1942. This is how he says he loves and misses her. Lunsford captures the delicate naïveté of two young people who don’t quite understand the world around them. Their relationship is difficult enough, each coming from a culture disinclined to accept the other. Their feelings are true and we can’t help hoping they’ll be reunited someday.

What begins as anthropomorphized inanimate object absurdist comedy becomes, as the best absurdist comedies do, a parable for the human heart and the human condition. A demonstration of how our expectations of people are like our expectations of appliances: I invested in you and you owe it to me not to disappoint me. "Why can’t you be good?" How many of us have been asked that very question? By parents, teachers, coaches, even so-called friends. How many of us have asked it? At our best, we embrace each other's flaws and limitations, and FRIDGE nudges us in that direction.

The permanence of the written word is powerful. Especially the handwritten word. Even on a greeting card.

Norkin has created a lively play for senior actors filled with heart, romance, and delightful banter. It's a celebration of the past and an invitation to make the most of the present. Holiday festivals should leap at this one.