Recommended by Scott Sickles

The money we could all save on therapy bills…

Incremental loss over time is the price we pay for maturity. Loss of passion, imagination, wonder, dreams… Here, Soucy asks us what the people we wanted to be when we grew up would think of the people we actually became. The journey to the answer is grounded in deadpan humor, pragmatic introspection, and great heart. In a few short, sweet pages, the veneer of adulthood is cracked by something greater than nostalgia and more tender than regret. Lively and lovely.

There are a few tried and true time travel tropes that get reused and reinterpreted all over again with varying degrees of success. This one is a winner. Swenson makes the familiar fresh while seeming, to me, to slow down time. The play feels like a lightning fast action sequence slowed down to a conversational pace, but in a way that heightens the escalation of the situation. The climax is terrific, the final moment really sticks the landing. I would love to see how a director would choregraph the action on stage, especially throughout a packed autidorium!

Even the die-hard literalist in me gets swept up in the poetry of this piece. Anthropomorphizing pies so they can talk about their creation and evolutions from ingredients to finished pastry could go a lot of ways, from comic horror and puppetry to somber
metaphors about fatalism and rebirth. Speckman, true to form, creates something clear, beautiful, and universal: a retrospective recipe for growing up, for coalescing into the people we are meant to be, of the design of human growth. Absolutely lovely with a kicker last line. And you can still do it with pie puppets!

It's the umlauts that'll get ya. You think you're being cool with the Germanic punctuation accents that you think are Nordic but aren't but then someone comes along and they know...

They know...

Plummer delightfully skewers teen naiveté about music, show business, life, love, and punctuation while celebrating the wisdom of hard-won experience and the delicious sadism of parentally imparting those lessons on the aforementioned arrogant adolescent artistes.

The characters and interplay are sheer joy. And who doesn't love a play about teen Death Metal bands in New England!

There's a moment in this play where I just went, "Ohhhh. Oh, honey, no..."

I almost wrote, "In early 20th Century Russia, it was hard to be..." but there's never been a time when it was easy to be anything in Russia. It's a hard place in every respect, especially societally.

Leave it to Gatton to find warmth, fragility, and even tenderness in this cold climate. The lower the notes go, the higher this play soars. The revelations are bittersweet reminding us just because you fix a crack in the wall, the crack is still there. It's just full.

Where is this paradise where you can go shopping on Black Friday and casually stroll around the mall??? No screaming or hitting! And that's just the adults! I must find it!

This placid mall is an idyllic and ideal setting for this wee journey. Everything seems rather normal at first, but Mackling slowly pulls back the veil on why this kickoff to the commercial Christmas season is different for this mother and son.

Their large offstage family happily looms large, while the world never seems small even though it is intimate. A sweet and surprising holiday short.

Sounds have to have explanations. They just may not be ones you like. Especially if, after eliminating all other worldly options, the only conclusion is otherworldly.

A fun exercise in atmosphere and suspense, the piece requires a director who’s not afraid to take their time to achieve that act-one of a horror story feel, where nothing is wrong yet something is definitely not right. Fortunately, Dzubak doesn’t keep us waiting long to immerse us in sustained creepiness. The characters and their bond feel real and the ghost is scary and fun. Deliciously spooky!

JUST AS SWEET is the ideal cappuccino: perfect amounts of sweetness and froth, and it gives your heart the little jolt you didn’t know it needed to face the world.

DeFates takes one of our time’s most common vexations - the misspelling of names by your barista - and creates three delightful and distinct characters in an early rainy morning conversation as effortless and refreshing as getting wet in a gentle rain.

When I finished this play, both hands slammed into my temples as I declared aloud: “FUCKING GENIUS!”

Of course, I don't want to oversell it… Logan makes that mistake in the play, overselling Sally’s sea-shell shop to Page and look what happened…

Seriously, LOOK!!!

A glorious absurdist piece, it weaponizes a tongue twister into a metaphor for the prison of expectation.

Again, Marchant demonstrates her gift, or rather her expertise, for creating characters in off-kilter circumstances with deeply human needs and impulses.When you see the end coming, the tension only rises.

The payoff is stunning!

Intriguing, unsettling, and amusing all at once, and fascinating through and through! Marchant captures the absurdist tone and atmosphere of Pirandello (and all great absurdists) giving the characters a setting and scenario and relationships that are just realistic enough but also ever so slightly... off.

While there is a mild sense of menace, it seems clear the wife and the secretary bear no ill will toward the husband and are in fact rather concerned. In a second reading, the interpretation can be quite different with a noirish dread!

It's delightful any way you do it. See for yourself!