Recommended by Lee R. Lawing

Beautifully written ode to love! This would have been a great one to see live on stage. Bravo!

This brings back a lot of memories. Most of them good. There was nothing like looking at a Calvin Klein model on the boxes of underwear. And if we weren't gay before seeing them, most of us who had the right wiring were certainly gay afterwards. Hey paints such a picture with young Wade just coming into his own sexuality and the shopping for underwear with his mom is priceless as it is embarrassing for us to read about it. Like I said, a lot of memories. Most of them very good.

Relationships, no matter the pairing, are always hard and a work in progress. This fourth installment of the Sock Monkey series by Carnes gives us a beautiful and funny take on one that's hit that fork in the road where big decisions need to be made. Sometimes relationships remain there at the fork and this play captures that moment so perfectly.

Thought-provoking play about the clutter in our lives, both externally and inside. Speckman puts together such a powerful play in such few words that there is no clutter in her piece since every word is needed for this beautiful tribute to the possibilities of change.

Rico the Magnificent teaches us that we can all sing and make a difference, even if it's a little off-key. This play has everything that a Christmas play should have. Big Heart, badly sung Christmas carols and a heartwarming ending that would unfreeze any Scrooge heart around!

Antigone's Sister is filled with such raw emotions of the possibilities of what our world could have been like if we had all only started out on the same footing in life and had been given the same possibilities of equality from the very start of life. I loved the theatricality of the staging and the language which gives it a sense of calm to the reader and audience member even though you are screaming inside of how wrong our world was and is. Thank the gods Goldman-Sherman is there to bring this injustice to light with her beautiful words.

Another searing monologue by Wyndham who voices a voice for those who do not have one and those who have been pushed back into the system or removed from the country. It's a crime that we cannot get on board with being able to help these people and remind ourselves that even our ancestors came over for the same reason all the new immigrants are trying to get in, to set their life path in a new world of hope and promise and not just the hatred from everyone who is fighting anyone new and in need.

This play has three things I always enjoy reading about: aliens, love and humor! Jones Alien Farmer's Wife is humorous and lovely ode to first love and looking for the right person among the zillions of possibilities out there in the universe. Peggy and Wilbur are endearing characters who glow with such personalty. And just like we learned from Dorothy all those years ago, sometimes the best yang for your ying is in your own back yard.

It's the simple things that will take you on a journey that you don't even think possible by seeing it, but suddenly time disappears around you. Sometimes it's a picture you come across, or a an object like in Weaver's play where he's written an ode of love for his home city.

Sweet lesson play about making sure you honor the universe and not tempt the fates by taking things you're not supposed to.