Recommended by Adam Richter

"Joey" is a masterful memoir. The episodic scenes are each horrifying and heartbreaking in their own way, and the epilogue brings a kind of uplift that I never saw coming. This is an important and powerful play that needs to get onstage in front of an audience. Just amazing.

'Zounds, this was a joyride!

Scott Sickles' Shakespearean play about bastards, birthright and dry cleaning is a wild and uproarious play featuring two brothers equally lovable and loathsome. The dialogue is fast-paced and a razor-sharp homage to its inspiration — to say nothing of laugh-out-loud funny.

Please, someone produce this play!

This is a beautiful and touching play about how we grieve, but also how we cope with loss and carry on with our lives. The ritual that the children develop seems absurd and silly at first — as do so many childhood rituals — but its importance soon comes into focus as the play moves on. Bravo!

This clever updating of the Medusa myth skewers two subjects simultaneously and does so with great humor: Medusa herself, and parenting. Turns out the ancient Gorgon is also a helicopter parent. She's not only a nightmare for Perseus (who now holds a place in her heart and her foyer) but for the beleaguered school administrators who have to deal with less lethal iterations of her sort every damn day.
This is a great two-hander that would be terrific for any 10-minute play festival, especially one centered on mythology.

For too long people have interpreted the Myth of Sisyphus as a metaphor for the human condition. Marcia Eppich-Harris points out in this buoyant and funny play that the Greek character is a metaphor for the WRITER'S condition. An endless, monotonous task that deprives us of our time to write? Yep. Can relate. The way he responds to the assignment had me giggling. Great job!

I will never look at La Croix the same way again. Only in the hands of Philip Middleton Williams can a somewhat anodyne sparkling beverage rise to such an elevated status as it does in this wonderful monologue. We get to know so much about Alex in half a page: Why he drinks water and how his beverage of choice makes his life better. An actor would have a great time unpacking this monologue.

This is an absolutely brilliant use of virtual theater. Aly Kantor takes a scenario that seems all-too-familiar — a woman stuck at home because of a pandemic — and proceeds to upend all of our expectations in this tension-filled, compelling drama. Outstanding!

In a few short pages, Robert Mattson packs a great deal of thought-provoking issues: race, class, the elusive American dream, aging and of course, lawn care. Oh, and it's funny. Vincent and Frank are two friends who've seen what suburban life has done to them and they are powerless to resist the siren call of lawn maintenance. This terrific two-hander would be easy to stage, indoors or out, and would delight audiences. Bravo!

I had the honor of presenting "Cleaning Gravestones" in a televised staged reading for Reading Theater Project.

This is a brilliant two-hander about the complicated relationship between a woman and her parents, whose relationship has, it seems, always been fraught. The father tells painful but necessary truths that propel the action, and the mother, though unseen, looms large as a character in her own right.
Beautiful and heartbreaking. Someone needs to stage this play.

I'm pretty sure that this is the first time I've seen the title of a Scott Sickles play in the dialogue of a Scott Sickles play*, and it is totally worth it. This sendup of tired writing tropes is so spot-on and funny, I'm going to wince even harder the next time I hear Elrond declare, "You shall be the Fellowship of the Ring!"
Produce this play. It is laugh-out-loud funny, clever and a third complimentary thing!

*Technically it still isn't, since no character says the phrase "Tropes I hate."