Recommended by Jerry Polner

In Nick Robideau's icy dark comedy, a toxic cloud of unknown origin doesn't completely cancel the funny, but it does scare the daylights out of us. Some part of the country has been wiped out, and the three principal characters retell and relive their mutual betrayals and the crime they can never come to terms with. Barbarians is a brilliant, frightening, devastating piece of work.

Dolores Díaz tells a quintessentially American story about a fake doctor who offers fake remedies and becomes a real success. It's funny, it's sad, and it's full of the buoyancy of a still young country that needs to believe there's an easy solution to every problem. Man of the People is a great read!

In The Delays, it's always New Year's Eve and we're always left standing at the same sad airport gift shop. But a chain of characters take us backwards in time through missed opportunities and small victories. A poignant, funny, and beautifully written play.

Principal Principle beautifully dramatizes the tedium, the teacher burn-out, and the high-stakes testing built into our city high schools. Every inch is funny, truthful, and heartbreaking. A great read!

A fun, funny romp of a play about the Beast and his beauty and their relationship problems. A natural addition for every evening of 10-minute plays!

When a woman poet from Somalia stays over with a married pair of liberal arts professors, she brings a part of the world they weren't expecting. Forgiving John Lennon by William Missouri Downs is a funny and damning picture of academic politics, not so free speech, and our universal confusion about what's culture and what's just plain wrong. A tough comedy with a killer ending.

Somehow Emma Goldman-Sherman is able to write a play that is very much of our time and very much eternal. The title, which is also the list of characters, takes us through Ron and Missy's married life, from the top of their wedding cake through parenthood and into late middle-age. Like the best of Thornton Wilder, it is funny, explosive, and damning.

It's 10 years after the Salem witch trials, and New England has still not learned its lesson. In this masterful dark comedy, Liz Duffy Adams reckons with the abuse of religion and the abuse of people, all in one blazing, action-packed story.

In Kelly McBurnette-Andronicos's brilliant play, these women do a lot more than whisper. The Ku Klux Klan, political corruption, and the coming age of the flappers all collide in 1924 Indiana when organized women become a force to be reckoned with. An exciting, fast-moving story and a great read!

A funny, pointed, well-crafted story about looking for racial justice in all the wrong places. Produce this play!