Recommended by Lee R. Lawing

The holidays can be so wonderful. All the cozy family stuff and the traditions and it's all even better if your have family that you love and can relate to and are not just doing the tango of feelings to mesh up with theirs over the holidays. This is a beautiful and lovely romantic play about real men who are naturally afraid about bringing a kid into this hateful and ugly world. Bullying probably won't ever end, but the more people that raise their kids like Sam and Peter, the world sure does have a shot at it.

A lesson as old as the ages and one that seems to keep getting lost over time. We've all experienced this fire that Lermond writes about and some of us have gotten burnt. It's nice when you can wear a fire suit going in and come on the other end with everything intact including the love and romance of it all.

It's all supposed to be faster with the new technology and yet it winds up all about nerve and having a little of it to reach out to make that call whether you find it the old way or new way. Romance can be just a phone call away.

Proving that even those who claim to not like someone can overcome this dislike in order to save the day when that day is threatened by unknown forces. Shelved is a funny play with plenty of puns that make you laugh out loud, but don't let the puns lull you into thinking it's not a lot deeper, where the bonds of friendship can be struck at any moment if you just allow it, regardless of how musty you might be.

What a great play! Imaginative and dream-like and yet the pieces fit tougher seamlessly. With out country out of control and stepping back in time to take more and more rights away from women and from letting them decide what is right for their bodies and for themselves, Phoebus gives us a play abut hope and setting the course back on track and the importance of fighting for those rights to let women have that say in what is best for them.

There's no mountain tall enough when two writers put their minds together to cross it. Funny play about the act of creation but more than that one about friendship and the importance of it especially during a zombie apocalypse.

All too real feelings that all of us have at some point in our lives. Martin's play shows us the importance of human connection and being able to speak up for ourselves to let someone know we are in pain.

Who knew that even in dystopia, families will still love to argue at Christmas. The title pulled me in, O'Day's magistry of the words and this family kept me reading. Traditions are what we all grow up with and it's strange to think of those traditions becoming ones that are used to further a side in a conflict or their own way of thinking as if it's better than all the others. This play is funny and very real and also horrific because this future could sadly be ours. We better watch out.

Grief comes in all shapes and sizes and how many times have we taken on an object of someone who's just passed and held that object and if it were clothing smell the smell of the deceased or just held it tight wishing against all hope they had not died and were still here with us. DeFrates gives us this in the form of a lollipop, along with dashes of comedy and true horrific moments and who are these men-in-yellow who did horrible things to these three girls. Read this and read it again and you will always be amazed.

We all dream of retiring some day and we always dream about just relaxing and sitting back and playing games, but if we’ve learned anything from television (i.e. Dexter) is that serial killers do not go gently into the night like most of us would. This is a love story about rediscovery the things that brought you together and that made you feel alive in the first place and if that’s sharpening the knives again and singing the score to Sweeney Todd, then all the while better.