Recommended by Tom Moran

A well-structured, naturalistic piece that builds up to a fun and unexpected twist at the end.

Self-absorption reaches its logical extreme in this two-minute ditty about the end of the world. What will it take to drag some people off of their phones and out of their solipsistic bubbles? As the play wittily posits, absolutely nothing.

Whittier is a pretty weird place, and the play does a solid job using it as the basis for an entertaining story of female friendship (or maybe more...?) couched in a ghost story. I was impressed by the play's thematic consistency, in that the legend behind the ghost ultimately resonated with the simple human interactions on which the piece is grounded. It also uses Alaskan "characters" as background without turning them into obvious stereotypes.

"Chewie" may be the most referential play I've ever read. It's also funny as hell, using a "Star Trek" setup (despite the title) to drag us through pretty much every sci-fi trope of the last half-century, one tagline at a time. It all leads up to a pitch-perfect, wonderfully deflating last line that ends with the appropriate whimper.

Wonderful subversion of the masked hero genre. Shades of the Princess Bride in its mixing of a quasi-medieval setting with high comedy. Absurdist and compelling at the same time, and some terrific lyrics to boot.

The ridiculous story of Hollywood's worst director, told in compelling fashion. The songs are great - would love to see this staged - and the structure, featuring narration by a suitably pompous Orson Welles, raises the piece above mere biopic. I was a bit worried it wouldn't live up to the film (still my favorite Tim Burton movie) but I needn't have worried; while this covers much of the same territory, its take is fresh and endearing. As it turns out, there's enough crazy in Ed Wood's life to support multiple works.

Pointed, trenchant, and toeing a line between overt satire and sorta-almost-believable, this play hits all the right notes. Plenty of laugh lines, a terrific and telling soliluquy, a wonderful and well-timed reveal that raises the comic stakes considerably, and a great coda at the end make this one pretty much pitch-perfect.

A hysterical retelling of the ghost Hamlet’s exhortation of his son that managed to be thoroughly modern while still staying true to the original characters. Laughs throughout, and especially benefits from an excellent twist at the end as well as a killer coda. Great fun.

A play that starts out small and ends up tackling the biggest topic of all, our connections to one another. Also plenty of awkward and absurd laughs along the way.

One of the more evocative elements of baseball is its lack of a game clock, and Higbee seizes on that to write a charming, wistful short about growing old and packing it in (or perhaps not.) What shines in this play is the affection for the game and the spot-on play-by-play - it feels authentic even as the events of the piece grow more unlikely (albeit still plausible.) Good to the last out.