Recommended by Eric Pfeffinger

This is a play built to be electric onstage with its hilarious bouts of awkwardness, expert sense of build, mounting tension and frictive chemistry. There's even a fun meta-awareness buried subtly into its central debate: is this a Christmas play or not?

A master class in comic pacing and killer timing.

Edgy and regrettably timely, this play dismantles hateful rhetoric by pushing it to the absurd extremes of its logical conclusions. A politically engaged and necessary work.

This is a COVID-era festival of funny, fraught, aching subtext, and a delicious opportunity for its two actors.

Instantly absorbing, ruthlessly smart, mordantly funny, brilliantly verbal, uncompromising in its refusal to moralize. A vibrant collision of Shakespeare and this morning's culture-war headlines.

It's easy to love this show for its heart and honesty and emotional resonance. But don't overlook what a smart and gifted craftsman Franky is. The story is ingeniously and unshakably structured. And while some one-person shows can threaten to slide into an inert wall of prose, this is indisputably and fundamentally theatrical; it's propulsively written for three dimensions in real time, building the audience's presence and reactions into its rhythms and dynamics. Plus, it's relentlessly hilarious when it isn't being heart-rending -- and sometimes even when it is.

Between this collection's casual erudition, offbeat humor and ruthless sense of economy, the most obvious point of comparison is David Ives. But I think I may actually prefer Mark's execution of the short-form anthology: it's warmer, more ingenious, and it holds together with the kind of unified eclecticism that binds together the best short story collections. I'd love this play even more if I weren't so mad that I didn't write it.

This play is a nonstop delight -- clever and wise and insightful and just really freaking funny, with inerrant comic rhythms and a barreling momentum that keeps the appalling behavior displayed by the producer characters digestibly hilarious. Warning: if you're a playwright, watching this storyline could cause ulcers.

It's a grounded relationship drama, except when it's brainy speculative sci-fi, except when it's deft verbal comedy, except when it's chilling technohorror. A smart and urgent play with tantalizing design possibilities and some visceral moments that really make me want to see it fully staged.

400 years of American history powerfully delivered in one brief minute.