Recommended by Peter Fenton

Gut-wrenching. Adam Richter's CLIPS is short and to the point specifically about local journalism and broadly the futility of dreams--and I loved every line of it. The two characters illustrate perfectly the battle between the young and ambitious against the rich and powerful. This story is bleak, but it is one that has more than justified its darkness.

This play absolutely must be heard out loud! I just love the back and forth between these two little old Italian-American ladies recounting their childhood and the good and the bad of it all--but they were happy (maybe?). Jennifer O'Grady has masterfully captured the voice of her Italian grandmother and takes the reader on a walk through the lower Eastside. And we were happy.

I can't say I expected this piece to go where it did, but I adored the journey it took me on. I'm honestly amazed at how real of a family history Julie Zaffarano was able to seamlessly weave into the father/daughter dialogue over jumper cables and that silly malaproper "Knowledge is power, France is bacon". A touching exchange that left me with a little more hope than I started.

This conversation between two old, spiritual men of different traditions is beautiful. While I myself am neither Jewish nor Lakota, it moved me to see these two characters find common ground and be moved by each other's stories. While the piece is set in 1955, it's especially prescient in the current moment of history (November 2023). Thank you, Peter Langman, for this piece.

This piece is so different than what I typically gravitate toward, but Ozzy Wagner really delivers a beautifully lyrical piece that explores a depth of emotion that I don't think a more straightforward theatrical presentation would illustrate with justice. With tight choreography and deliberate, stylized delivery this can and will be an extremely powerful piece, hitting like a poignant spoken word poem.

This is only the second piece from Ryan Kaminski I've read, but I can already tell Kaminski is a writer who is a master of giving a setup for a twist, but can execute it in such a way nobody in the audience sees coming--and still, it's the very best ending for the specific story being told. I love the bookends with the soft joke about the first and second confessor of the day, too! A wonderful thriller for the lapsed Catholic in all of us.

I was genuinely surprised by the ending of this 10-minute piece! I'm a sucker for a stylized period Western and even when I thought I knew where the piece was going, I was enjoying every step of the way. Kaminski's subversion work was both surprising and enhanced the piece. Great work!

There's a charming Black Mirror aesthetic to IMPOSSIBLE THEORIES OF US by John Mabey, but Mabey goes deeper than that in their IMPOSSIBLE THEORIES. While a Black Mirror episode might leave the reader with a bleak overall feeling of "technology is bad", Mabey explores the ethics of AI as well as love, grief, and trans identity in a meaty, highly stylized full-length piece for two actors with an inventive narrative structure. A miracle? A tragedy? A rom-com? It's all of these things. Sounds impossible, but I have a theory John Mabey has pulled through for us.

It's funny how an entire lifetime can change in a moment with what seems like a small decision, and Philip Middleton Williams has illustrated this idea in just ten minutes. What I appreciate about this ten-minute two-hander is how Philip handled the ambitious time-jumping on stage between four unique scenes with cinematic ease--it made the screenwriter in me smile. Another well-written triumph in the Philip Middleton Williams collection. My only question left is: which of their futures is real? (and I think that was the entire point!)

Morey Norkin, a playwright living in Japan, has just given this lifelong American Gentile a masterclass on a chapter in my country's own history! What's fascinating about this piece is the fact that Morey flies in the face of the stock writing advice "show don't tell" to great effect, by instead being very strategic about what he shows--and lets narration cover the rest. If the reader is paying proper attention, their brain will fill in the rest. A well-researched, educational, and gripping historical narrative about Antisemitism in America fit for any age.