Recommended by Ken Love

Screw-ball comedy or farce, Brent Alles' "Wake Up with WKUP" will keep you riveted and keep you going from beginning to end. Mr. Alles' sense of biting humor is on target. And engaging. Now when can we see it staged?

Okay! YEAH!! I get the joke. And I appreciate humor that dares to be grisly, yet works! Very nice, Morey. Now give me another!

Aleks Merilo's "The Nearest Far Away Place" is actually not a theater piece - it's the sound of heartbreak faintly reverberating in the darkness. Yes, it's a work for our time. A reminder of how a politcal agenda affects the most vulnerable of us so profoundly.

A short, precise piece that ends with a well-timed Hitchcockian jolt. It left me wanting more. Which is what good writing is all about.

I was raised in a Pentecostal Christian household. And as an adult, I recall having discussions very much like this with my parents (though a bit more pointed). "A Blessing" by Jennifer O'Grady is as short or as long as it needs to be. And everything you need to know is tucked within these short minutes. But the clincher is in how the work ends - one of the best resolutions to a story I've yet read. Nicely done, Jennifer!

Thirty writers have stepped up to recommend this work. And though there's no reason to believe that my little recommendation will mean much, here it is: "How About Them Dodgers" is not prescient. Nor is it terrifying in the dystopian sense. This short work is in and of the moment. Which makes it downright tragic. America has produced some of the greatest writers and artists known to the world. And they're now forced to deal with censorship. Difficult play to read, yet necessary.

I think it was the film critic/film historian David Thompson who said that a good satirist was like a demolition expert. Kelly McBurnette-Andronicos has lobbed a hand grenade at a wrong-headed institution with "Most Outstanding Minority Girl". The three characters are solid, the dialogue stings. This hand grenade, however, won't destroy its intended mark. Yet damage will be done. And felt!

Like Tracy Lett's "August: Osage County" and Sam Shepard's "Buried Child", Will Cloud - with "Reap The Whirlwind" - has crafted a play in which characters wrestle with the demons and ghosts of an unreconciled past with wrenching futility. The inevitability of destruction, or tragedy, storms through the air like toxic rain. This play demands a full production.

I see a woman . . . or a man . . . speaking, sitting at a table in a bar. Toward the back. Not many people. A little dark even. A half-finished drink is on the table. Along with a cigarette. Yes, a cigarette! There is a feeling of utter timelessness about this work. This lonely, tortured soul could have stepped out of any era - the 1950's, sixties, seventies - or maybe they're with us today. Nicely done, H. Avery!

H. Avery's "Notre Dame is Burning" is a heartbreaking letter to a friend and mentor who will probably never know how deeply she was loved and appreciated. And it's rare to find a writer with the courage to be honest - painfully honest. What's needed for this piece is an actress capable of embodying not just pain, but the need to heal.