Recommended by Marcia Eppich-Harris

Mister Frank would be a hilarious piece at a short festival. I've had weirdo teachers like this before, and there always seems to be something about dead animals and sex cults. I swear. The other students blowing off the oddities is also, unfortunately, familiar. I'm actually a little scared at how much of the absurdity here rang true! haha! This is a great little piece and has lots of potential for comic actors!

I wish there were a Cal in my school when I needed one! Alliance gets to the heart of a girl whose circumstances have hardened her. She trusts no one, refuses vulnerability. But an alliance? That she can do. Cal's offer to ally with her against their mutual bully feels like a breath of fresh air and offers hope where before there was only pain. There's a lot of heart in these characters, and it would make for a great piece in a short play fest!

Now that we've basically accepted covid as endemic, it's interesting to look at pieces written during the height of the pandemic and think about what we've been through. Did we change all that much? I wonder. This piece captures a moment in history and in a brief monologue captures the isolation, the fleeting hopes, the long term despair, and the financial hazards of 2020. If we try to forget the pandemic to protect ourselves, we learned nothing. Read this piece and understand a bit more about humanity. Well done.

How many, many times have I wanted to say something along these lines aloud to someone? More than 23. Willis captures the sass -- but also fatigue -- of people who are constantly being judged by society's absurd standards. I can see this as a monologue or an ensemble piece. It's incisive! Loved it!

What's scary about this play is how absolutely plausible everything in it is: the self-righteous cyber terrorist, the catfishing, the identity theft. Every character has a dark secret, and none of them have the moral high ground. People are complicated, indeed, and these characters are the kind of people you want to watch on stage. They inspire shifting loyalties in the audience, making you question your own ethics, until the final unraveling of the truth. This play is an indictment of our online world -- one that we need. Brilliant!

The comedy in this piece is great on the page, but on stage, you’d have audiences crying with hilarity! The poor actors in this piece are just trying to do a gig, but with a script like this, it’s hard to be at your best! The translation is tremendously bad, but that’s good for us, as we laugh with schadenfreude. Well done!

Having worked with an intimacy director on the last show I produced, this felt familiar to me. The characters in this show are on a journey toward authenticity in a performance, and while it feels foreign to choreograph and discuss every move, they find that that path yields far more intimate results. Ripe with comic potential!

In my life, I have been both the child and the mother portrayed in this play! Short, but completely real, A Lie-in in Winter is a witty glimpse into the busy life of a parent, who cares so much that she'll even get her son ready for school on a Sunday. Well done!

Oh gosh, this is capitalism and libertarianism at their craziest! Micronation is a zany example of political mayhem in the extreme, and it's pretty hilarious -- as long as it doesn't foretell the future of America! Very funny (and also a tad scary)! Highly recommended!

Graduate school can be a lot of things, but there's always a little disappointment involved, even if you DO get in. Here, we see a character reacting to being flat-out rejected by all the schools he applied to, and boy does it hurt! Ironically, the guy probably has a future in "unboxing" videos and doesn't even know it, but he's going to have to process this big obstacle first. There's some comic potential in here along with the grief. It would be a nice challenge for an actor!