Recommended by Jordan Bird

What a fun, weird, wonderful mashup of genres and characters! This would be a blast to see onstage, and a super fun challenge for designers.

Spooky, surreal, and very cool -- I would love to see a production of this monologue, complete with the period dress!

Wyndham's plays always hit me in the gut -- because they're -funny-, these characters are so true, are so -serious- about themselves... until, suddenly, it's not funny anymore. Because his characters are desperate, and desperate people make desperate choices. I love Evangeline. I love Jackie. What they do to one another in this short play hurts: because Wyndham has given us dignity, humor, and grace -- and then the characters, in their desperation, snatch grace away from each other. Deeply heartbreaking and beautiful.

Partain captures the voice of a 16-year-old girl so perfectly and honestly -- I immediately love Anna, because I *knew* her, because I *was* her. All of the hopes, the thrills, the anxieties of being a teenage girl are perfectly sketched here; I felt transported into this moment in a way I didn't expect. Partain expertly moves us from beauty to horror -- this play is hard, but it is a necessary piece of theatre for this moment in time. These are the lives we're sacrificing: these hopes, these pulsing hormonal desires, these dreams of making the world sparkle.

This play ushered me through such a range of emotions in such a short space. The relationship between Jordan and Taylor is so authentic and honest from the first moment, which makes the end so powerful. Every part of this play feels uncomfortably close to home for me -- the female body in the corporate space, the male gaze through a camera lens, the relationship between three women of different but nearly-overlapping generations. Jordan is a woman stuck between the different elements of her identity. Simply: this play is saying a lot in little space. Read it. Produce it.

This play left me with the deep questions I always hope to have after encountering a piece of theatre. The consequences of turning away from each other, from pain. The haunting nature of losses that don't make sense. The costs of choosing your own small needs over the large needs of someone who needs help. The ways we turn away. This collection asks us to look into the darkest places in our hearts, to stare our failures of love in the face. Oglesby uses theatrical magic (and magical thinking) to relive memory and try to make sense of loss. Stunning.

All I needed to read was "If Jeane Luc Picard and Ellen Ripley had a baby" as a character description to know that I would love this play. Partain plays with many scifi tropes in a way that feels fresh and immediate. The beauty of scifi is its ability to prophesy over our current conditions, and this is the case in MESSAGE OF PAIN -- it asks us to be present to now, as long as now lasts, and to accept that nothing lasts forever.

This play gives us the simple addition and subtraction of gun violence, through the eyes of a six-year-old survivor of gun violence. This play is tragic, gut-wrenching, and so, so necessary. In these numbers and in this boy's voice, we see the impact of gun violence on both its individual victims and on the entire community.

An incredibly beautiful, brutal short play -- the image of a tiered monument being watered by Love is so lovely; and the discussion between these three characters is necessarily hard, vulnerable, horrifying. Antone manages to give us statistics without the play ever feeling bogged down with them. The creeping shadow would be a beautiful project for a lighting designer; every artist involved in a production of this play would be thrilled with its meaning and its challenges.

A beautiful, haunting portrait of the vacuum left by the sudden loss of a family member to gun violence. The rhythm of the piece is exquisite, punctuated by Paul and Sara pounding on the table and by Reina replaying the voicemail. The tenderness between Paul and Sara -- each comforting one another in their own way -- touched a specific place in my spirit few pieces of art touch. This is a beautiful, hard, vulnerable piece of theatre.