Recommended by Vince Gatton

If fast-talking, sharp-witted, miserable people are your jam (as they are mine), then this comedy is 100% for you. And honestly? If fast-talking, sharp-witted, miserable people annoy you, I'd say this comedy is for you, too. Amy Dellagiarino effectively crawls under and through these characters to get at the genuine heart and ache and frustration underneath all the quick-witted defense mechanisms, and makes it worth your time. (Also: ugh. Matt. And his dumb painting. UGH. The worst.)

A freakin' gem, and I love it. As someone...um, *familiar* with trivia nerdiness, I can testify that the characters here are 100% spot on, their wit, fervor, sharpness of tongue, and level of investment amplified and deepened by slogging through the worst months of the pandemic -- to hilarious and poignant effect. (That their arch-rival team is named Quizzlecoatl was all I needed to get on board; when I finally learned their own team's real name, I fist-pumped. Nerd.) A winning comedy with a beautiful message about the value of community, connection, and what everyone has to contribute.

A symphony of mourning in unfinished sentences, this lovely, strange, visually and verbally poetic piece sings off the page. The dialogue here is broken, self-censored, and interrupted, the silences expansive...yet Kullen Burnet deftly gives you all the pieces you need to fill out its very moving backstory -- as well as giving actors rich characters to play in the here and now. Straddling the lyrical and the everyday with confidence, Burnet tells this moving story with a clarity of vision and voice that's exciting to see in a young writer. Sweet and sad and beautiful.

Look, far be it from me to rag on ten-minute play festivals, goodness knows. But when they come in for a skewering as savage and affectionate as Rich Espey's "I Saw This in Paducah!", it's hard not to cheer. Inane themes and ridiculous "World Premier Only" restrictions; audience members who are both passionate (yay!) and entitled (boo!); and somehow, through all the absurdity, something actually important trying to get said and heard...they're all here in Espey's frustrated, angry, yet big-hearted comedy. Put this in your festival and let the meta sparks fly.

Visceral, raw desire gets filtered through a magnificently dexterous verbal brain in this scorching solo piece. Rarely have I seen animal eroticism expressed so unapologetically, so nakedly, and yet with such precise and adept use of language - onstage this would be a hell of a ride for both performer and audience. Call the fire department, Miranda Jonte is here to burn the house down.

I felt uneasy from the get-go of this encounter on a train-station bench, my unease made all the more palpable by the easy charm and wit in the banter of these characters. What, I thought, is going on here? When the answers, such as they are, start to come, what was uneasy turns outright unsettling -- but also weirdly empathetic. Prickly, dangerous, funny, and fragile are the people of Elisabeth Giffin Speckman's world, and I'm here for all of it.

Emotional and environmental catastrophe strike at once for two star-crossed lovers in this lovely and sad short play. Sickles is a master of keeping his eye on relationships and emotional truth within genre trappings - whether it’s horror, scifi, crass teen comedy, or the magical realism he’s working with here - making Kelian and Louis’s moment alone deeply moving amid the rushing danger. (Also, the specifics of body type add a fresh, interesting layer to the interspecies dynamic: what it means to Louis, with his greater mass, to be the one cradled, held, and possibly rescued.) Beautiful.

Huge things are happening in LANG, both within this flat and without: DC Cathro captures the moment when a marriage and a nation both stand on a knife’s edge, and nothing will ever be the same again. Those familiar with Fritz Lang’s German Expressionist classic Metropolis will likely find echoes of its characters and beats and moments here, which is surprising to say about a “small” marital drama; but there they are, in big emotional gestures which nonetheless feel human-sized, real, and painfully true. Intimate and enormous at once, LANG packs a punch.

Weird, wonderful, funny, and delightfully grotesque when it wants to be, this highly theatrical site-specific story about a particular ghost legend becomes a larger meditation on how we shape and re-shape our ghost stories and myths, finding and creating meaning according to our time and needs. Really fun.

As a fan of horror movies, I absolutely loved this homage to/evisceration of the tropes of the genre. With great humor, genuine tension, and a solid respect for twists, this short takes aim at the relentlessly unforgiving nature of horror-movies-as-morality tales, and I’m here for all of it.