Recommended by Adam Richter

There is a perverse joy in seeing the men of the 1950s get their deserved comeuppance at the hands of their ever-devoted wives. This is a delightful one-minute play filled with tension — both between the characters and their lopsided marriage, and in the unfolding of Kathleen's efforts to even the scales. This play is a macabre delight.

Yup.

That's about all you can say in response to this short and dead-on one-minute play. Greg Lam nails so much of what is wrong with, well, everything.

Yup.

Philip Middleton Williams writes so eloquently and beautifully about grief that this play feels both new and timeless at the same time. Grief is not something you go through, like a rite of passage; it's a companion that stays with you forever. I also love the complex yet utterly real way he writes about fathers and sons, and how that bond never vanishes, not even in death.

Celebrity deaths are a touchstone in all of our lives, yet they mean different things to different people. I loved how DC Cathro, in just a few short pages, gets to the heart of this contradiction and the effects that big news events can touch our lives but affect people of different generations in discrete ways. As with everything he writes, this is beautiful and thought-provoking.

A fascinating character study that both explores and questions the gulf between two seemingly opposite personalities. Both A and B are much more complex than their names would imply. This would be a great addition to any 10-minute play festival, and would have the audience thinking about it long after the house lights come up.

Maybe I'm a curmudgeon, but I think anyone who's a "social-media influencer" is begging to be mocked, and Hayley St. James is more than happy to oblige. "Glass of Water" is a witty and incisive satire, calling b.s. on the cultural gurus who think life is to be instagrammed.

Oh, my. What an emotionally complex play. In the seemingly simple lesson of tying a tie are generations of wisdom and mistakes that get passed down. You have to wonder when the cycle will stop — or indeed, whether the unspoken event of the day is really the time and place for a paradigm shift. Steve Martin specializes in richly layered characters who reveal so much in such a small amount of time, and he's done it again here.

The sense of relief that both Ally and Rose carry through the play due to the end of the pandemic is nicely offset by a creeping sense of dread. This wonderful dark comedy by Dominica Plummer has many laugh-out-loud moments and some poignant lines but you just can't shake the feeling that something is going to go terribly wrong.
"Lunch" is a great comic showcase for two female actresses.

In this time of isolation, we take human connection wherever we can find it. Emily McClain tells a lovely and at times painful story of two people who bond over one of the most 2020 rituals of all: food delivery. Erica is just trying to survive and Marcus is simply doing his job, but it's heartening to see that by play's end, that's not entirely true for either one of them (hope I didn't spoil it.)
Audiences will identify with these characters, and their plight, once theater comes back IRL. Bravo!

What an ingenious an instructive way to introduce our kids to bondage talk. The parents are hilarious in their role play and as they try in vain to protect little Mason from their kinks. I loved the frank (sometimes too frank, DAD!) discussion the parents had with the kid whose nightmare subsides in the real-life horror show of catching his parent sin the act. Something tells me Mason will be OK, but his tastes will probably be vanilla when he gets older.