Recommended by Scott Sickles

History is littered with bad ideas and people who make the best of them. They know the idea is bad, but when it’s law, policy and procedure… a good person does what they can to make it work. Unfortunately, there’s only so much policymakers can predict.

Busser makes it clear at the jump: this can’t end well because it’s already over. There is nothing anyone can do. But WAS there? This is the story of someone who did everything right. And yet…

This testimony is only the most recent stage in a spiraling tragedy. Devastating.

Someday, I hope to print this out, hand it to the right man and say, “here are my instructions.”

Society often dictates that (we’ll just say) people must be their stalwart best selves even during acts of physical intimacy. We must protect our dignity no matter what while our sexual partners finger-bang us wearing kid gloves whilst we achieve mutual orgasms and respect.

Here, Jonte says “fuck that and fuck me!” While others clutch their pearls, she orders a guy to yank hers off! Sex can be rough, messy, unbridled fun involving horizontal AND vertical surfaces. Fuck yes!

SNOWGLOBE is one powerful page. Hall gives us everything we need to know to convey how an entire life arrived at this one crucial point. A great audition piece that must be studied and rehearsed with care. Nuance abounds and the power of the emotion in this piece is in how that emotion is controlled: to prove one is fit to care for a child one loves beyond measure, despite the unfortunate certainties of the circumstances. It's a stand against collosal unfairness, agony for the character but a gift for the actor.

“Depth” is not a word commonly associated with hurricanes. (I checked.) That ends here.

Plumridge’s personification of a massive hurricane is a concise and compressed biography: a one-page, first person memoir from birth to the apex of her power.

There’s almost no mention of people. As such, Esmeralda is a perfect metaphor for sociopathy and narcissism, especially instilled by parents who live for their children to become greater monsters than they were. Destruction is power, territory strength, people targets, unworthy of names. We know these monsters. We love them as they bear down on us. They are Esmeralda.

Too bad "clever" isn't a five-letter word.
But "funny" sure is!

Richter sends up early 2022's pandemic craze, dryly capturing the fervor, frustration, and spirit of our obsession with it. This would make a fun entry in an evening of shorts and, in the long run, serve as a time capsule about how the zeitgeist became obsessed with a word game a year after the government itself waged war on expression and intellect.

BRAVO!

Hey, that's also five letters!

In contrast to the elegant lament of Monologue 1, Hernandez gives us a declaration of war! Damiana takes a stand, immersing us in her perspective, her illness, her PTSD, her struggle against both it and its treatment which wage war with each other to her detriment. Her terms! As much as Damiana wants to be off her meds, I want her off of THESE meds. I want her to find the RIGHT MEDS. I want whatever makes her well and happy, untethered from heartbreak, clocking the distance between her sorrow and the light of her future.

Read this aloud.

If you've ever gone a long time without love, read this aloud.

If you became accustomed to love's long absence, read this aloud.

If you've known what it's like to have love after a long, long time only to lose it again, read this aloud.

If you've always known love, if love comes easy to you, if your heartbreaks are quick and your loneliness brief, read this to yourself... then read... it... aloud. Slowly. Savor and understand it.

I just want to tell Damiana she's not alone. I hope she discovers that and finds light again.

I hope hoping that this would be the one where Joey got away. Be warned: it's NOT!

In documenting his childhood abduction, Swenson dramatizes tactics he used to survive the long seconds that made up the longest years. He may not have even known that's what he was doing. He just did it. The use of dissociation for solace, relying on the imaginary, the importance of systems and numbers: which need to be remembered, which are important until they are reset, who did what. It's astonishing, agonizing work that must be read and produced! Keep 'em coming, Joe.

It feels callous to begin by commenting on the economy of storytelling in a tale like this, but I need the distance. I need to talk about Swenson's technique first because if I address the content, I may go mad. Mad with rage, with sympathy, with a desire to avenge him and every child who has suffered like this, mad over my impotence to do so. Mad. So instead, I'll comment on how vividly he conveys the violence, brainwashing, the temporary peace and imaginary solace, the footsteps, the details, the horror in so few pages. Okay, I'm ready now...

Everyone talks about Adam and Eve... including their neighbors apparently! Nelson gives us a sassy pair of gossips in this beautifully bitchy take on the OG sinners' expulsion from the garden. In my head, this all takes place on some primeval stoop! I would love to see how others would stage this. Well informed and meticulously thought out, CREATION GOSSIP so much fun, you want to hear these two spill all of the Tea in Eden!