Recommended by Vince Gatton

This is a damn hoot and a joy: Hermia and Helena from A Midsummer Night's Dream are lost in the woods and encounter Sappho, whose hilarious, droll, and decidedly Sapphic guidance shows them a way out of their messy romantic entanglements with the boys. The dialogue is sharp and hilarious - a throwaway joke about pockets made me bark-laugh, and did I detect a Sondheim reference? - and the whole vibe left me smiling and giving quiet little fist-pumps. A delight.

So much to love about this play, so little space to list it all: the (literally) fantastic premise, the high ethical stakes, and the relationships complicated by very long histories. There's the delicious juxtaposition of the workaday setting with the enormous supernatural forces assembled there. There's the captivating metaphor of marginalized groups maintaining a shadow system of governance unseen by the dominant world. But mostly there's the rich, funny, angry, sad, brilliant characters, and the spoken and unspoken magic between them. Funny, moving, wearily romantic, and also kinda hot, this is a flat-out winner of a one-act.

This terrific 1-minute play has made me re-think what’s possible in that form. Every detail, every glance, every non-verbal action is hyper-important in telling the story of this complex, layered, profoundly emotional, and ultimately beautiful moment. A gorgeous reminder of the complicated and sometimes counterintuitive ways we depend on each other, especially when the chips are down.

This utterly bonkers romp throws characters and plots from 19th Century BritLit into a meat grinder -- Sense and Sensibility, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and Sweeney Todd, to name but a few -- and manages to turn out something not only coherent but balls-out hilarious! The endless pile-on of plot twists, coincidences, complications, and revelations are made all the more delightful by how entirely aware DeVita is of what he's doing -- and lest it get all too literary, he's not above indulging in some of the cheapest gags and wordplay I've ever been ashamed to guffaw at. A hoot.

Well, I wouldn't have thought "Speculative Fiction About Marie Antoinette" would be my jam, but here we the hell are. When it serves as a delivery vehicle for sparkly anachronistic dialogue, characters any actress would drool to play, a confident and sure-handed sense of comic rhythm, and generous doses of patriarchy-fucking, who am I to resist? Extremely smart and abundantly funny, this is comedy gold with something to say. Count me all the way in.

They say the devil's in the details -- but angels can be, too. Such is the case with this lovely ghost story monologue from Mr. Keyes, wherein the specificity of particular sights, sounds, smells, and objects draws you completely into a vividly real, albeit mundane, moment...making it all the more powerful when something profoundly *not* mundane occurs. Evocative and relatable, it allows you to know exactly how this room feels, how it smells, how it sounds...and how it would feel to experience what happened there. A quietly thrilling short piece.

The banter is relaxed and jovial, believable and fun...until the swerve comes and none of it is fun any more. What I admire most about this terrific short, though, is that the big swerve isn't all it's interested in: other, subtler turns keep coming, leading us to places we didn't expect at the outset, or even in the middle. As is often the case in his plays, DC Cathro lets you think you're in one kind of play, hard-turns into another, then drops you off on the shores of something more fully rounded, interesting, complicated, and humane.

I love a good spooky story, and I really love a good spooky story about people telling spooky stories. This one has all that, plus hidden drama lurking under the surface that you can't possibly see coming until it hits you in the face and makes you gasp. With terrific dialogue and genuine affection sparking back and forth between its delightful best-friend characters, this short play manages to be everything you want in a scary story told around a fire: it's fun, chilling, and sad as hell, all at once.

I love these characters so much. At once an intimate story of two adult brothers in a motel room and an epic candy-colored fantasy bonanza, this highly imaginative, deeply personal, extremely playful, and profoundly moving play swings big, exploring how children's imagination and play are more than just games. Family history and the set itself keep yielding up surprises, creating an aural and visual vocabulary that combines gritty naturalism with explosive make-believe. Christian St. Croix's characters may recoil from sentimentality, but they're poignant as hell nonetheless in their open hurts, longings, and abundant love. A knockout.

It’s rare to see a stage play swim in the serial-killer-hunting waters so common in TV and film, and Jarred Corona dives in beautifully here. Someone is throwing teen boys off of rooftops, and flawed detective Ellis sets out to stop them. Amid the spot-on execution of tropes you’d find in SEVEN or L&O: SVU, we get a story steeped in Southern culture, loaded up with distinctive characters, sprinkled with casually queer romance, and told in dialogue that alternates between hard-boiled pragmatism and ethereal, haunted beauty. A dark film noir reboot for the way we live now.