Recommended by Adam Richter

You can have all the best plans for world domination you want, but if you don't have a good staff, then you simply won't get far. John Busser's hilarious take on a hapless supervillain and his even-more-hapless underlings is a riot to read, and it will be even better on a stage. Someone needs to include this in a night of short works right away. Absolutely brilliant!

A lovely meditation on loss, recovery and promise — and not necessarily in that order. As poetry, "Discarded" is a work of beauty. As a performance piece I suspect it will grip audiences from the start, none of them breathing until the runner finally releases their own breath toward the end. A fantastic monologue.

Prince Charming is done playing these games. And Cinderella stopped long ago. Emma Goldman-Sherman has rewritten these characters with a world-weariness that is perfectly relatable for our age and completely appropriate in theirs. This is a fun retelling of the classic fairy tale where both major characters Are. Just. Done. With. It. This is the ending the two characters needed, even if they thought they wanted glass slippers and endless parties. Well done!

Writing is great, except when it's not. Jack Levine's short comedy is a wonderful distillation of the creative process and what goes wrong when writer's block rears its ugly head. It's not often that a horse and a monkey follow, but hey (or is that hay?): Everyone has their own process. This play would be a real delight to audiences when performed live, although fellow playwrights might want to leave the room. Bravo!

P.S. You can bet I'm going to steal the monkey-walks-into-a-bar joke for use at family gatherings.

Sam Heyman's short play is a richly layered look at the lives of college students, each of them on journeys that have nothing to do with their classes. I especially enjoyed the dynamic between Chip and Brett, and how Heyman upends our expectations of who the confident, self-assured one is in their interaction.
This is a great standalone piece, but as part of a series with these characters (as the title implies), it is an even better introduction. Bravo!

In a world gone mad, you might as well laugh in the face of death. Bryan Stubbles' terrific short play does just that, showing that Death is no match for the mother of a young maiden. This is a great three-person play that would be great fun on stage, a treat for actors and audiences alike.

So much of what I want to praise about this play has to do with the title, but to utter even a word about it would ruin the whole thing. In this delightful bit of meta-drama (a play about a movie scene featuring actors playing actors playing characters) Matthew Weaver weaves multiple threads of dramatic tension and plucks on all of them right up until the very last moment. This play lingers with you long after the final blackout.

Just when you think Philip Middleton Williams is finished subverting your expectations about this familiar-yet-original cast of diner characters, he subverts them all over again, to great comic effect. This is a hoot of a play that skewers what politicians and the general public think of voters in the proverbial small-town diner. Sheer brilliance!

Parents just don't understand ...
The modern dating scene.
This is a sharp, funny two-hander about the generation gap, modern dating and of course, "My Little Pony." I loved the role reversal between the mother and daughter as Shawna tries to explain the facts of life to her mom. A fun script that would be a hoot for two actresses (and the audience.)

We've all been tempted by the menu at Bitter Grounds — or we've been longtime customers.

This is a great satire that exposes what happens when we hang on to resentment for too long. Maripat Allen's dialogue sparkles in this whip-smart comedy, which has tons of room for great physical expression as well. This would be a great play to produce in front of an audience. Well done!