Recommended by Doug DeVita

Delightful piece with a compelling story and relatable characters, and endless possibilities for rich visual staging. Charming, lovely, and heartwarming.

Some things never change, and despite the passing of more than twenty years since it was written (and filmed as "All The Rage"), Roland Tec's "A Better Boy" is still a sharp, scathing, funny, and ultimately touching look at the perpetual search for that indefinable "something or someone better" waiting just ahead of the curve.

Touching, funny, heartbreaking, and terse, with beautifully drawn characters, "Passing On" tackles some thorny issues with grace, wit, and aplomb. Questions are asked for which there are no easy answers, decisions are made without judgment, and one is left wondering "How would I react in the same situation?" and one wonders long after the play is over.

Charming, whimsical, and absurdly funny piece, with five fun roles, especially for Walter, the not-quite-human/not-quite-dog – the physicality required could be outrageously scene-stealing – and for thoroughly confused Millie, the new receptionist. Wonderful.

An acutely observed satire, Steve Moulds' "Conflict House" deftly mixes reality TV, scientific research, Stockholm Syndrome, and the classic situation of a group of disparate people locked in a confined space, stirs, and bakes up an outrageously funny and frightening tale of a dystopian world not far removed from the realities of every day life. The paranoiac tension rises steadily, as do the laughs, uneasy though they may be.

Three poets wander into a wood... and the punch lines write themselves in this imaginative, literate, and howlingly funny short in which Gacinski does what he does best: mix poetry and drama seamlessly into stylish theatricality.

It’s fitting I should read “Lady Liberty Is Losing Her Vision” this morning, the 133rd anniversary of La Liberty’s dedication in New York’s harbor. In Lee R. Lawing’s metaphorically allegorical monologue, she is a tired, ailing lady, not unaware of her plight but determined to stay the course. A sobering but hopeful piece, I can only imagine how moving it is when brought to life by a skilled actress; just reading it was a sobering but hopeful — and touching — experience.

Complex in its structure, ambitious in its scope, and altogether heartbreaking in its depiction of what might, and what never, could have been, Goldman-Sherman's "Zen & the Art of Mourning a Mother" hits several bullseyes all at once. And in a stroke of genius, each of her five characters represents a stage of grief, and it is a spectacular conceit, spectacularly achieved; each character is so clearly delineated, yet the seams never show. Beautifully done, all the way through.

Light, tight short in which the Freudian slips are racy and lacy, and more like hilarious Freudian face-plants. About the most fun making amends in a laundry room can possibly be.

What a gorgeous play, easily the most elegant, and passionate, of Scott Sickles' oeuvre. Simmering with a delicious sexual tension that never boils over into melodrama, this is a delicate but frank look at the mores of a different time, when "the love that dare not speak its name" spoke in many hidden ways, most of them unfulfilling to those speaking them, and the emotional toll it cost was devastating. As is "Nonsense and Beauty." Devastating, and achingly beautiful.