Recommended by John Busser

If only we could all have a tough friend like Sophie to get us through life's biggest screwing-overs. Marj O'Neill-Butler shows us two friends, one suffering, the other picking her up and dusting her off to face the world again. Smart dialogue (Sophie is a quip machine, the perfect type of friend to have in these situations), and a heart-breaking story (Not only jilted, but the scumbag took all her money too) make this play one that would absolutely kill onstage. Great job Marj!

It's wonderful writing when a conversation can take place without any spoken dialogue. Through only physical expression and movement, we are shown the start of a relationship even as the participants struggle to communicate. What I found most brilliant about this was the way the writer draws the audience in by the simple act of providing no spoken information. The audience is laser-focused on trying to pick up visual cues to provide story elements. I would imagine the audience is supplying countless motivations and reactions from their own minds to fill in the blanks. I loved this play.

Lee Lawing's intriguing play about Otto Rahn, a German officer and keeper of more than a few secrets from the Nazis was riveting reading. I imagine it would play terrifically onstage. A man who was enlisted in a regime based on the swift judgement and condemnation of others it deemed inferior would seem to be a perfect subject for his own accounting in front of Lucifer, but Otto is a more complicated character than that. Lawing gives us a man worth more than his outward appearance would suggest. Very engaging.

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.