Recommended by Vince Gatton

This short play about two people facing imminent nuclear annihilation manages a difficult trick: it’s very funny without turning its premise into a gag. The emotional stakes remain hugely real throughout, which heightens both the horror of it AND the humor. (Recording a final video message to their children is emotionally agonizing; the need for repeated retakes is human and hilarious.) I had forgotten this real-life incident at first, but what a terrific idea to examine: what would you have said or done or confessed, had it been you?

What a lovely and powerful short play. The competing perspectives between Jerome, an elderly Black man, and Ali, a young Somali refugee, are loaded with history, wonder, pain, joy, and mutual love & respect. Both in their own way strangers in a strange (very white) land, the bond they share is tender and beautiful -- as is this play's understanding of how love and critique of a people and a place can (and possibly must) co-exist.

Christian St. Croix's short story about two estranged siblings teems with resentment, betrayal, secrets, frustrated ambitions, fully-realized dreams -- and so much love, wounded and otherwise. There's also plenty of humor, grounded in terrific, specifically-rounded characters who behave like, well, people. St. Croix's mastery of the unspoken moment is a particular joy: in addition to a very physical climactic confrontation and one hilariously well-timed prop retrieval, there are many telling non-verbal gestures in play here, one in particular of such grace and sensitivity that it took my breath away. Highly recommended.

People either love Chekhov, or don’t get why anyone loves Chekhov. Christiane Swenson has pulled off something really special with Chebutykin, a modern-ish sorta-prequel to The Three Sisters that should delight both camps. Its irreverent language and overt theatricality bring the Prozorov household to hilarious life, while still feeling 100% true to these deeply beloved characters. This, we will say at the bar afterwards over too many drinks, THIS, all this humor and pathos and just, like, LIFE, man, is what’s already there in Chekhov; Swenson has now given us all a new lens through which to see it.

At once absurd and absurdly relatable, the premise here is loaded with comedic potential, and Toby Malone mines it for everything it’s got. Excellently sustained and escalated, the interpersonal tensions and physical comedy bits build at a satisfying clip, all while subtly examining the very real push-and-pull of sharing with another person your space, your book, your life. A delightfully aggravating and nonetheless loving examination of marriage. (Toby Malone, get the hell out of my bedroom.)

This is so much damn fun, its characters’ easy breezy likability and charm so powerful, you’d think DC Cathro was a wizard at dialogue or something. He definitely casts a spell with these two, making comedy and romance look easy when we all know they’re not. If I had magic powers, I’d give Margie and Duane a full series pick-up.

I always enjoy a good comedy about afterlife bureaucracy, and this short in which Layla and an agent of D.E.A.T.H. investigate the possibility that her boyfriend’s demise was a clerical error is a solid addition to the genre. A kind of buddy-comedy road-trip case-review, it recalls Scrooge’s adventures with his visiting ghosts, but to darker, funnier, far less sentimental effect. You think you know a guy...

This is just flat-out awesome. Elisabeth Giffin Speckman’s take on the House of Atreus gives us a Clytemnestra who’s relatable, modern, and human without sacrificing any of her towering capital-letter Tragic Grandeur. It’s a play in which the gods, Achilles, and mall ear-piercing kiosks co-exist; with language that alternates between spare elegance, zippy repartee, and delicious monologues of wry insight; and with choral movement that invites and demands bold theatrical imagination. Plus it’s hilarious. And enraging. An absolute hoot and an absolute tragedy, this play is alchemy of the first order.

Using the mythological underworld as an organizing principle, Scott Sickles give us a collection of short stories about a serial murderer of young boys that delivers all the horror its premise would suggest. But horror alone is not all he's after: the uses of attraction in the victimization of young queer kids; their pre-adolescent yearnings that aren't fully understood but are easily observed; the twisting of shame into a weapon...Sickles gets inside the minds of these young people as well as their predator, pulling up the rock and shedding light in several dark places. Wow. Yikes, but wow.

A gorgeously strange, beautiful, sad, and funny solo piece. You’re Working the Checkout at Albertson’s uses a series of keenly observed vignettes to capture and examine our isolation and loneliness, and, by doing so (to some degree at least?) transcend them. Clearly speaking to our Covid-19 enforced-distancing times, but just as resonant with our atomized contemporary existence in general, this is one pandemic-born play that will remain just as powerful and funny in years to come.