Recommended by Peter Fenton

Whoa. This one's a dark, heavy two-hander. Don Baker has illustrated a bone-chilling everyday monster with this piece and it's really not for the faint of heart, in all the right ways. Definitely worth a read when one is in the mood to explore a dark character study with themes of sexual abuse, racism, and privilege. I can see this being a very powerful theatrical experience when performed live. The monologues were especially strong. Well done, Don.

With THE BLATTRIAM, Jarred Corona has written a creepy, high-concept play with terrifying ambition and deliciously brutal execution that draws on what it means to be human, but not quite in the way a reader might expect. I especially appreciated the themes of familial disappointment and rejection, and the parallels between Petyr's transformation into a cockroach and LGBTQ identity were unmissable. A great read, especially for fans of Kafka.

This is the first of hopefully many Morey Norkin pieces I'll pick up! Norkin's dialogue in this two-hander is incredibly clever, two comics (one at the start of her life, the other at the end of his) meeting in sort of a limbo between optimism and cynicism in the dressing room right before Ms. Jennifer Rasmussen's shot to perform for an SNL scout. This piece reminded me of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and would be a joy to see performed live! Comedy with a melancholy twinge always hits me in the right place.

I had the pleasure of playing Hal in a reading of this short piece this afternoon—Heyman does a great job of illustrating a tender wound that cuts both ways of this very recent break-up. What I loved about this piece was how quickly George and Hal are established as to who they are and what they're all about. You can tell there was something there between these two men without falling into the trap of over-writing their backstory. A powerful piece that will be great to see live!

The thing I love about Darrin Friedman's work is that there is never an easy answer, and it's almost like as the playwright, he takes a smirking delight with the reader posing sort of a question: "How do YOU think it ends?"—I've been waiting to see him do this with a comic piece, and in PHONES, his first short and his first comedy, he delivers! Shades of the surprisingly poignant Adam Sandler movie CLICK, Friedman offers us a chance to live vicariously through an everyman who gets the chance to take revenge on those who have wronged him.

What's the one lesson everyone tells you when you start writing? "Write what you know." Dang it, Philip Middleton Williams has delivered one of the most brutally intimate pieces of theater I've ever read with A Tree Grows in Longmont. We put ourselves into our work, to be sure, but this is on a whole new level. What a powerful story of love, heartbreak, and the writing process. A must read for gay men of any age, and for anyone who wishes to appreciate Philip Middleton Williams both as the person and the playwright.

Writer’s block is hell. This quick-witted ten-minute meta comedy really captured for me what it must be like on “the other side” of our imagination as playwrights—and how it must feel to be pushed to the side as a ”supporting character” and much more unsettlingly, how it feels to wonder if and when you, too, will become a cliche

Dana Hall's Refracted Light is a poignant slice-of-life coming-of-age drama sort of in the vein of a LADY BIRD, but the coming-of-age arc that really pulled me in was the mother's. Hall has a wonderful way of illustrating the very real, incredibly primal fears we have of abandonment through the role of Lucy. I also especially love the intimate scene-by-scene way this play is presented, melancholy with a twinge of comedy—true to life itself. Highly recommend! (P.S. the Act I finale exchange between Becky and Penny is worth the entire read. We could all use an Aunt Becky!)

Melissa Milich has written a deliciously dark screwball comedy with HUMAN REMAINS! All three actors in this piece have such a fun responsibility to play out an emotional roller coaster of greed, death, and absurdity. This one will be a lot of fun for each actor, the director, and the audience alike. Well done!

I want the teacher from the beginning of this play to give every pre-show speech at every show! Today’s America is an intriguing, poignant 10-minute drama portraying two well-rounded characters in conflict—what more could you ask for? I appreciate that this sort of play can appeal to just about anyone along the gun control ideological continuum. Well done!