Recommended by Scott Sickles

Nobody saw it coming.

Yet there it was and people were gone. Even if you only lost one person to the pandemic, it was a cataclysm. And losing them early on when no one knew who to blame, led to a boomerang effect… When there’s no one to blame, we blame ourselves. If only I… maybe if we…

What if?

I think American drama underestimates the power of the final text message but here it’s an atom bomb.

As time passes, our immediate outcries of grief, our accounts of loss, become time capsules as well as monuments.

It’s like it was written especially for me!

And I think any actor who performs this will feel that way. The monologue is so instantly accessible to anyone who has been under a lot of job stress, been caught doing something they shouldn’t, and started to lose their shit during quarantine.

There’s an inherent pace and music to the language that carries the speaker through measured panic while hanging from many a fraying psychological thread. The circumstances themselves are uniquely hilarious, just like the character.

A great audition piece and a wonderful comic showcase!

Beautiful play! A simple circumstance with deceptively complicated characters. There’s both compassion and callousness in unexpected places. What you don’t understand early on, you feel in your bones by the end. The moments are hard-won and rewarding. A perfect piece for a short play fest. I imagine in will be in all of them. Just wonderful.

I am worried for Bob! I can’t help it. He’s a nice man venturing into the world of dating apps, post marriage, post heartbreak, post early middle age… I want him to be okay. And’s that’s a testament to the writing. In no time at all, O’Neill-Butler gives us a new friend to root for while giving him a fighting chance at love with a charming woman who is probably lovely. She certainly *seems* lovely. Hmm… Bob strikes me as a cautious fellow. I want him to text me after they meet!

Barney and Judy are incredibly fun characters. If they were in a workplace sitcom, I'd watch every week. They've got great coworker chemistry – compatriots not rivals, she's more experienced at the job and has lot to teach and he's eager to learn. He's gay so we're not waiting for a cliched smooch. It's a perfect setup!

Williams cleverly sets his Christmas play over Memorial Day Weekend, setting it apart from more typical holiday fare. The musical choices are equally unorthodox and perfect!

Read this play as a present to yourself. Produce it as a gift to others!

I’ve always had an affection for gentle giants… those who do not know their own strength and for whom delicateness is a challenge nigh on impossible. Olly’s pureness of heart shines brightly, yet he’s blind to the truths of the world and his effect on it.

Telling the story from Olly’s subjective POV, misspelled words and all, Plumridge lets us imagine the slings and arrows, the cajoled transgressions, that he himself is not aware of. Eternally hopeful inside a prison of ignorant bliss, Olly’s as tragic a figure as ISOBEL herself.

It’s great to know that *some* students actually survive Miskatonic U. Never has there been a valedictory more hard-won!

Shelby’s speech is the perfect commencement address for any occasion because it is filled with terrible truths about power structures and the individual’s place within them. Life is a horror show saturated with unimaginable monsters and incomprehensible cruelty. And now, that world is ALL OURS! WHOO-HOO!

Shelby and Soucy know how to embrace the day as much as the dark, manifesting an eclipse that will guide humanity through madness. Hats off!

After reading every line, my inner princess would call out, “I know, right???”

When the end is nigh, what was the point of temperance? Of restraint? Of mourning that which will eventually, inevitably, and imminently rot?!?

This is not to say one *shouldn’t* take care of one’s self, but at the same time the ravages of time are upon us and death is the only certainty so at least LIVE A LITTLE before your Un-Life begins. Right???

“Water undoes me.”

The heartbreaking resonance of those three words in the midst of a lovely soliloquy in a play filled with poetry… “Water undoes me” undoes me.

While the actors need not be, the style, tone, and emotionality of the piece is undeniably Japanese. Like shadows projected on the paper walls of a pagoda, the characters’ souls know darkness and a sorrow that defies light. Words are their swords and shields, and the goal is life… at least for one more day.

Breathtakingly elegant, dreamlike but grounded. This play is a testament to compassion and hope.

There’s a righteousness that comes with hypocrisy. It increases exponentially when it comes to abuse, especially the abuse of one’s children. Who has the right to do things to your kid and who doesn’t.

Children themselves can manifest an equally powerful righteousness, as destructive as their abusers’, especially when they understand those abusers have handed them the weapon of leverage and taught them to wield it.

Cathro presents the culmination of a multitude of sins, violations, and counterattacks, theatrically kept being the veil of the confessional.
Unseen twists and revelations abound. Striking and disturbing.