Recommended by Vince Gatton

Sure it's inside baseball, but consider me a season ticket holder. A manic comedy delight for those in the know. I love you delightful weirdos. John Busser should be arrested.

Shut UP, Steve Martin! Shut all the way up with this zeitgeist-aware but totally-its-own minute-long swoony hockey story. Jaded romance is my favorite kind of romance, and boy, this delivers.

The most Chekhovian play Chekhov didn’t write. Gina Femia has written a glorious collection of characters in this small community theater troupe, whose yearnings, embarrassments, peeves, and heartbreaks are small in scale and vast in emotional impact. Tempests in teapots, perhaps; but the care, attention, and love with which Femia observes these people remind us that each person is an entire world. Our lives matter, and in our frictions we are hilarious, ridiculous, wonderful, and profound.

This play deserves a place alongside Wicked and Grendel in the canon of brilliant “villain” re-evaluations. Tybalt or One of Your Nine Lives is fresh, young, exciting, heart-tugging, and deeply empathetic, giving us a Tybalt, Mercutio, and Nurse whose choices and fates are profoundly shaped by a poisonous environment of toxic masculinity. There is such tenderness here, told in a tough, sardonic, yearning, unforgettable voice. Brava, Erika Phillips, for this.

It's hard to talk about SHIPBUILDING without getting into spoiler territory. So just trust that Scott Sickles knows his way around scifi, and horror, and scifi/horror, as well as philosophy, love, and ethics. It takes great nerve to spend so much of your play's run time in the dark; it takes great cleverness to fold the Ship of Theseus question into a body horror tale; and it takes great humanity to have your twist turn in such an unexpected direction. Big thoughts, tightly packaged.

John Yearley is a Best All Around writer whose level I can only hope one day to approach. Everything he writes thrums with life in all its humor and heartbreak, through characters that are fully their own odd, idiosyncratic, beautiful, universally-relatable selves. TRIPTYCH is a case in point: a gorgeous, funny, jagged, gut-punching trio of short stories about unimaginable loss that nonetheless fills me with joy every time I think about it. Love leaks from every page, and leaves a mark.

Craig Houk has a gift for writing obstreperous older women - cranky, mouthy, arch, and complicated -- and he's given us a real gem in BIG BASTARD'S Patrice. As this Rural Gothic story unfolds in two timelines, Houk peels Patrice/Patty like an onion, exposing layers that burn...and bring tears. A potent mix of humor, danger, and dread, with an appealing dash of the uncanny, BIG BASTARD will sink its claws into you.

I love it when there's what the thing is about, and then what it's really *about*. This charming story may on the surface be about learning to navigate the thin veil between us and the unseen world...but it's *about* how love changes and surprises us, leading us to places we'd never expected. Life is long, anything is possible, we contain multitudes. "Dive on in." Lovely.

Daniel Prillaman unsettles like no one else, and he does it again masterfully here. The premise is so simple yet so deeply nightmarish, and the execution top notch. Mandy is drawn with such specificity, such shadings and color and personality, and the steps of her morning are so carefully calibrated, that the horror of it chokes you, right up to its boffo ending. Damn. That's how you do it.

Bullying is ripe territory for horror -- Stephen King's Carrie leaps to mind immediately -- and trust Scott Sickles to not only mine that horror for its more obvious dreads and chills, but also to dig deeper, follow uncomfortable moral reasoning, flip the script forward, and land you someplace you didn't expect. Cruelty iterates. And personal growth can take unsettling forms. This short will leave you feeling off your axis long after you finish.