Recommended by Vince Gatton

Humor, horror, joy, and sorrow commingle beautifully in St. Croix’s stunning play. Black Remy is raising his late husband’s white teenage son Pup, and their bond is gorgeously real, warm, idiosyncratic, and sharp. But darker events in their pasts and the present threaten the safe haven of their drive-in theater/trailer home. This fathers-and-sons story is funny, painful, and filled with so much love, exploring the monsters and ghosts that terrorize us, those that live inside us, and those that do both at once.

Michael O’Day's Billy and Ma are hilarious, and their zippy dialogue delivers primo, salty, Staten Island-y goodness. There’s also something much sadder, and even a bit scarier, lingering just under the surface in this portrait of an isolated and frustrated young man, fighting to prove his worth to a world that always seems a step or two ahead of him. This short winner takes place not very long ago, but the world today is more full of Jimmy Mangiarolis than ever. A funny, sweet, and sad warning of a play.

I promise I mean it as high praise when I tell you I found this play nauseating. Sage Martin plays around with effectively nightmarish absurdity before descending into all-too-real horror in this powerful short. Queasy-making, terrifying, enraging, and heartbreaking.

The dad struggle is real. This awkward conversation behind a toy store digs into issues about race, gender norms, and the isolation that toxic ideas about masculinity and manhood can create. Mabey explores these bigger ideas with his trademark humor and compassion, filling this encounter with fallible human grace notes that made me laugh and smile and nod. The kids are alright, if their dads can be, too -- in Mabey's world, and hopefully in ours.

This is awesome. Sally’s teacher is awesome. Sally is awesome. Elisabeth Giffin Speckman is awesome. And it must be said: what makes it all so awesome isn’t just the powerful and important message it conveys, but the high level of execution: idiosyncratic, natural, active, entertaining, urgent, very funny, and with an entire tight dramatic arc, Make It Known hits all the right notes and makes it look easy. Brava.

Maybe it's that I'm mildly claustrophobic; or maybe it's that I grew up where cave tours were standard school-field-trip fare and I can too easily place myself in this predicament; or maybe it's just that Kirkman knows how to tell a good story. However you slice it, this little bit of speculative history told entirely in the dark had my heart racing from the get-go. This desperate scenario is also infused with likable, distinct characters and a surprising amount of humor. No idea how the real-life story ended, but for me the play delivers on the shivers.

This is just damn gorgeous. Dante Green writes a liminal-space love story that hops around in time, building in plenty of space and air for these fleshy, prickly, yearning souls to connect, disconnect, and possibly re-connect again. Here's a play that both demands and reward actors who are willing to breathe deep and give it their whole selves. Intimate magic.

A hilarious imagining of what it must have been like to be the unseen Peanuts parents. Expertly borrowing the tone of a 1950s sitcom, Mom and Dad fret over young Lucille's latest aggressive project, and wonder at their precocious children's baffling familiarity with psychiatry and Karl Marx. It's probably unintentional that it called to my mind The Bad Seed -- but it's certainly intentional that it made me laugh my face off. Bravo.

There's a lot going on in this short piece -- live TV, a seasick cameraman, tons of information about sharks, and a very ill-timed helicopter and dolphin release, to name a few -- but at its core it's a simple story of a relationship hitting a crossroads. Sully is most alive when she's out shark-chasing with Ben; Ben's ready for a more stable, settled life. Ben's choice and its consequences chum the waters for a funny and heart-stirring confrontation filled with science nerdery, big feelings, and that delicious gift of an ending. Bursts with life.

An absurdist winner, this wonderful spoof of experimental, movement-based theater never descends into mockery -- it's way too skillfully done, too actually good in its execution, to go low. This sequence of blackout-sketch lazzi is so cleverly calibrated, so finely escalated, that the laughs, the horror, and the pathos blend magnificently, yielding a tongue-in-cheek love letter to barebones theatricality that also stares into the abyss. Downes has succeeded in having his cake and eating it too -- well, no, actually: his watermelon. Brilliant.