Recommended by Jerry Polner

The handbag may be faux, but the bruising identity crises of these characters are very real and very funny. Christine Toy Johnson’s play, which will work pretty damn well on stage or radio, uses a desperate quest for leather goods to unmask the true needs of these six footloose Asian-Americans. Trapped in a merchandising theme park, they have only a few hours to achieve professional success, meet impossible family obligations, and keep faith with their homeland. Altogether, a wonderfully imaginative comedy. Produce this play!

This is a wonderfully dark comedy about a distant wife, her gay best friend, and her aggrieved and sexually indeterminate husband. Very funny in the Joe Orton tradition, but with a glorious celebration of opportunism all its own. A great read!

In this shattering dramatization, reporter Nellie Bly goes undercover to expose the cruel mistreatment of women at the insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island, New York City in 1887. Nellie befriends a woman named Anne, who is worn down but wrongly committed and has no one left to save her. The story of the asylum is told through Anne’s eyes – how every working woman is just one job, one accident, or one marriage away from being branded insane and locked away forever. Near Nellie Bly is a brutal, beautifully written shot of truth.

This play is as close to a perfect love story as you can get – very funny, very charming, and with just the right amount of anguish and redemption. A young fortune teller woman, old beyond her years, advises and enchants a naïve and lonely accountant to death, or at least until there’s nothing left in the world that can come between them. If you want to produce a romantic comedy for two actors, this is it, stop looking.

In this brilliant and chilling drama, a split-up family can’t agree on what to do with its isolated, insolent, gamer teenage son. When his survivalist mother tries to push him into a life of home schooling off the grid, he chooses to escape on the only path he knows. Kari Bentley-Quinn’s Prepared is a fierce, finely cut diamond of a story. Produce this play!

In a small apartment surrounded by war and bloodshed, a couple's mourning is interrupted by the wife of an ambassador intent on donating a meal of charity and glowing public relations. This dark comedy by Jeni Mahoney is funny, razor-sharp, and devastating. Produce this play!

I love the way Fathers draws me in. It gives me a breezy, funny showbiz story about a wildly successful TV sitcom actor woman working to break out of the box by playing all of King Lear's daughters at once. And then it blossoms into this other story about how to survive, out-grow, and out-live your father(s) by finding yourself. A great read and a wonderful play for a cast of 2.

The myth of the American west comes to a heartbreaking climax in this funny and sad comedy by Mona Mansour. We’re in a California town that’s seen better days. Mom’s pioneer tall tales are the only currency the family has left, and then things get a lot worse. This play is also a great story of the daughter who went away versus the daughter who stayed. A great read!

In Not Like Us, Desi Moreno-Penson beautifully sums up our boundless ability to cast out of our circle whoever doesn't fit into today's enlightened point of view. All of which makes for a funny, brutal, and telling little play. Great work!

A lovely, funny, sad coming-of-age story that reads as fast as a summer rushing by too quickly. If you can still remember grown-ups who thought they knew what you should do with your life, you will love this play.