Recommended by Vince Gatton

A knockout of a solo piece and a devastatingly effective piece of writing. Loewenstern’s construction here is cunning, using repetition to build and sustain tension, and focusing tightly on a series of micro-moments that understatedly reveal huge depths of feeling and yield enormous emotional payoff. An insightful, powerful gut punch.

I say this with love: Daniel Prillaman is broken inside. But lucky us, we reap the benefits of his derangement when it produces insanely funny, dark, horrific, and weirdly romantic shocks like this one. Not for the faint of heart, but an absolute gift for anyone who loves a good blood-soaked bark-laugh, followed by a tender “Awwwww!”

An utterly charming and ultimately gut-punching portrait of a Filipino-American lola and her grandson. There's so much going on here as these witty, smart characters navigate a kitchen together: immigration, assimilation, family dynamics...plus hate crimes and other threats specific to our era. A salty, sassy short piece that earns every bit of its emotional payoff.

As a Jeopardy fan and one-time contestant (aka Jeopardy loser) during the Alex Trebek years, I am here for any and all Jeopardy-related content. (My urge to weigh in on their discussion of the show's hosts was STRONG, y'all). What makes this a terrific play, though, for both Jeopardy fans and not, is that underneath the banter it isn't really about Jeopardy at all. Bravo to Austin Hendricks for his sublime subtlety, for leaving the unstated unstated. A quiet, compassionate portrait of the complexity of navigating change, even (if not especially) where there's great love.

A quiet, gentle drama about unspeakable cruelty wrapped in loving care, and a stomach-churning snapshot of very recent history. I sometimes worry that younger folks think this kind of story is a work of imagination, or exaggeration...and I'm grateful to Paul Donnelly for the wretched reminder that it is not.

Hilarious and grim, and the joke's on us -- as actors, sure, but mostly as Americans. I don't want to say any more for fear of spoiling the sly, dark humor of this terrific short. Read it and weep. And laugh. And weep.

This gentle, painful, and beautiful short play expands from the heartbreaking specifics of what happened to Elijah McClean into a universal meditation on sorrow and action -- and the many ways, big and small, that we attempt to honor the dead and make this sometimes-terrible world slightly less terrible. DC Cathro's light touch and frank approach allow for deep feeling in very few pages. Lovely, and one I'll think about for a long time.

I love this. Love it, love it, love it: the magical realism, the history, the wit, the perfectly-timed reveals, and then that perfect ending. I love Tim's precociousness, his clarity about who he is - which, even though it doesn't feel to him like it's worth very much, is of course everything. Genuinely funny with well-earned sentiment, this was a home-run in my book.

Haunting, caustic, and mysterious, this icy grey hug of a play gets at something huge and ineffable about grief at its most fresh and raw. We haven't all driven to the far north just to *not* see the Northern Lights...but anyone who's experienced a sudden, shocking loss will recognize Lena's sense of displacement, of a need that can't be realized, of being exposed to the elements...and that strange liminal state in which the coldest of comforts is the comfort you most crave. Sharp, unflinching, and darkly beautiful.

I love a comedy -- any play, really -- that pops with this much life and works on this many levels. Hilarious dialogue, characters to really bite into (yup, I said that), an excellent dawning reveal, further surprises, and most of all a central metaphor that's both fun and loaded with resonance: sexuality, body image, diet culture, gender expectations...all of these are there in this delicious story about appetites, and the special permissions we feel we need to give ourselves to get what we want. This does everything I want a short play to do.