Recommended by Adam Richter

A brilliant satire and a perfect play for our times. Steve Martin accomplishes so much in so few pages, and the result is a disturbingly funny comedy. Bravo!

"Naturalized" is a brilliant satire on identity and immigration, as well as a warning to be careful what you wish for. all of the roles are terrific, but the back and forth between Alex and his sister Taylor are comedic gold.
Bravo!

Christopher Soucy puts us right in the middle — no, not the middle — in the end of the classic horror movie, when almost everything that could go wrong has gone wrong and there is still an eternity before the characters have any hope of survival. This five-minute play throws audiences right into the thick of the crucial climax, giving us a terror-filled spectacle that spares us any exposition. We don't know why we should care for these characters, only that we do and we want them to live. Will they? Find out for yourself.

The language and movement in this gem of a short play are so much fun to read. They'd be an even bigger joy on the stage. Charles Scott Jones' short play is a wonderfully comic piece about the struggle to move on after a breakup, especially when the person responsible for the breakup won't leave the room. Fantastic!

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.