Recommended by John Busser

Amazingly effective for a one minute play. Ruben Carbajal gives us a complete story with the simple implication of what's missing for these characters. Unsettling to say the least.

Now THIS is my kind of comedy. Twisted. Jokes a mile a minute. Terrific wordplay. Family dramedy. It's all here. Aly Kantor has written a wonderfully askew fairy tale with a take on Red you probably never saw coming. I loved every minute of it.

I recommend this play on the last line alone! But that's me. There's a lot more fun to be had throughout this silly take on starting over. Morey Norkin gives us a clever, joke-filled romp on the Red Planet that had me laughing out loud more than once. I would hope you'll find it just as amusing.

Deny it all you want, but Death comes to us all. If it were as fun a time as Sawyer Quinn Brown shows us in this sweetly funny play, maybe people wouldn't fight it so much. I loved the name switches (I'm terrible with names too so this was especially funny to me) and the lovely turn when Beth begins to accept the inevitable. Terrific stuff.

Even monsters and super villains have to take some time to do the mundane stuff, like tax forms, and Eric Pfeffinger has shown is actually ALL fun and games with this fun meeting of Melto Man and Lady Mantis. The names, powers and origins are right out of either a comic book of a 50's sci-fi movie and Eric hits all the tropes that make those things so much fun. I highly recommend!

The friction between the newly married Jerry and Alicia has a nice comic buildup that explodes on a bus full of passengers, but instead of the expected breakup, we see a chance for reconciliation. This play gives us marriage as roller coaster with long climbs and fast plunges. Kind of like real life, I liked Jerry's "find-a-workaround-at-all-costs" attitude. But Alicia is nicely written as the more active of the two, subverting the usual expectations. Jack Levine has written a wonderful trip for us to take.

If we could get a plague of Jeff Dunne plays, the world would be a better place for it. I laughed my ass off from page one. (And who knew Ivan the Terrible made such a credible standup comic?) In fact, all these characters gave Eric Idle a run for his money in the funny lines department.

At first I thought this was going to be a tale that would get more profane by the moment. Nobody knows how to swear like a Scotsman, after all. But as I read, I was taken in by the profound heart and soul of this trip into childhood memory and found it to be a touching reminder of the power of family. Moving as a fucking earthquake.

How could I pass up a play called The Shark Exorcist? Well, I couldn't so here we are. The flat out weirdest concept for a play I've come across in a long time and I was rewarded for my weird taste in plays. Absurd is the best word to describe it. try it, you'll see.

I had the opportunity to see a terrific production of this at Madlab's Theatre Roulette for 2022 and it was probably (along with a second piece of Steve's called That Moment When...) the most emotionally satisfying one-two punch of the day. Steve's characters take on a life of their own (the spot on performances helped) and at least for me, I wanted to know the fate of these characters desperately instead of just passively watching their stories unfold. They became flesh and blood people for me and that all starts with the wonderful writing.