Recommended by Scott Sickles

I love miniature golf.

Much like the titular amusement, PUTT-PUTT is a cavalcade of obstacles designed to frustrate, trap, and bewilder its players! A glorious corporate nightmare with bad ideas being rewarded, standards being compromised, and very good reasons to run like hell! Anyone who’s worked in a project-oriented office, especially creatively, has experienced this kind of agony, though probably with less verbal deftness and physical comedy. The characters play off one another and escalate the situation fabulously. Fast and funny, Sapio putts a hole in one!

If Warner Brothers made a cartoon version of The Scottish Play, it might look a little something like this.

There are SO MANY dynamics and themes happening here. From the celebration of evil and terror as primal masculinity to the examination of the motivations and perspectives of literary antagonists and all sorts of social, sexual, and political dynamics in between. Dissertations could be written!

Most importantly, it’s entertaining as all get-out. Eppich-Harris has laid a groundwork of great roles for actors and tremendous inspration for makeup and costume designers. Possibilities abound!

CONFESSIONS… will blow your house down!

If you weren’t doing this in 2020, you wished you were.

Two years later, on the apparent tail end of the Covid pandemic, this is a profound snapshot of life as it was not too long ago, when everything was moving so slowly and we had no idea for how long.

Stirring in retrospect as well as a cautionary tale of what could happen again if we’re not careful, TO TOUCH is a one minute ode to physical and emotional human connection.

Heyman pulls off a bit of a miracle here. Adapting one’s own fiction is a trap filled with even more traps. Devices used in prose, such as omniscient narrators telling us what characters are thinking, feeling, doing are often deadly on stage.

NOT HERE!!! This omniscient narrator moves the proceedings along with aplomb! The characters themselves have great quirks, rich histories, and complex relationships. And oh, such wants!!!

It’s an object lesson in adaptation and omniscient direct address on stage. Better, it’s a delightfully human story. You will smile!

Well, SOMEBODY is DONE with SOMEONE’S BULLSHIT!

I hope theaters and short play festivals and producers everyhere of all lengths of plays read this one-minute ditty and drown in their own shame. I hope it brings them such self-awareness that they begin sobbing before they can catch a glimpse of their bastard people faces in mirrors that would shun them if they could!

i hope they choose to change thier ways. I also live in the world…

Thank you, Sam, for putting on paper what festers in so many of our blackened hearts.

Lisa Dellagiarino Feriend should be studied.

And so should her plays.

BEAST is a perfect representative of the Dellagiarino-Feriendly ouvre: a stratospherically outlandish premise questioning a previously accepted and unchallenged trope, presented with utter matter-of-fact absurdity!

Here, she targets BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, specifically the Disney version, though I encourage designers to be inspired by Cocteau! I encourage actors to just be inspired, especially playing the (potential) dual role of Beast Adam and Uglier Beast Adam! (Their real names.)

O, the choices you'll make!!!

The conflict is a perfectly constructed controlled frenzy!
A sublimely funny fractured fairy tale!

When you're a father, you have to be prepared for anything. You have life lessons to give your Baba. You know what Baba's mama's up to when she gets up to take care of the tyke. You have to be prepared for all the things you can't possibly be prepared for.

Baba Mikey's father is doing his best to cover every base he can. Plumridge allows him to pass on a lifetime's worth of necessary wisdom and fatherly love, as well as a full life story. It's a beautiful legacy told with a sure narrative hand.

Have tissues handy.

I’ve known this play for a long, long… long long long long time. It remains one of the funniest plays I’ve ever seen.

It’s also a gorgeously awkward utterly heartfelt romance between two fat people. (At the time of this writing, we “People of size” are saying “fat.” We’re over it.) There’s so much love and insecurity at the core of SKIN DEEP. There’s a reason it gets produced again and again.

With its warm, sharp humor and timeless themes, this is the comedy your season needs!

A-nommm-a-lyyyyy… is such a lonely word….

In Assaf’s world - nay, galaxy, things are definitely getting better. Instead of abductions, extraterrestrials catch humans and release them back into the wild… of their apartments. Even the anal probe is obsolete. Especially promising is the discovery of our planet’s bizarre fixation with heteronormativity in interpersonal and global power dynamics. You don’t find that nonsense anywhere else and this xenoanthropologist has looked!

A funny, down-to-earth, optimisitcally universal exchange of hope, wisdom, and fashion.

I opened with Joel and I’ll close with Fagen: “What a beautiful world this will be…”

Usually, when a meteor hits the atmosphere, tiny particles break off, more and more, creating a beautiful array of fiery light until they and the meteor, burning brightly, fall safely to earth, and that’s what this play did to my heart.

That’s it. That’s the rec.

* There is no meteor shower in this play, but oh there are vistas.