Recommended by Toby Malone

A brilliantly caustic take on the vapid trend of celebrities making other people feel bad about their lives during lockdown. Kirsten is living her best life and to be very clear, she looks like she's having way more fun rummaging around for snacks at the back of the fridge than those smug celebrities do. So much fun.

Loewenstern takes a familiar scenario - newly divorced couple negotiating joint custody, civility and school choices - and adds a real-time frying steak and an ongoing discussion of the primal instincts that drive affection, that means we know where this is going but can't help but think that after the inevitable backslide that these two will just remain more confused than ever: but it's not their fault.

Dan Caffrey takes on a sensitive topic with finesse and imagination, exploring exactly what would have been at stake if the Virgin Mary escaped her husband and demanded of a mysterious doctor that he abort the child she is carrying. Tense, thoughtful, aware.

This is a razor-sharp, witty take on finding new love in unexpected places, and despite aggressive bouts of self-sabotage, managing to maintain one's own sense of self. Self-aware, relentless, and unapologetically humorous, Alana Corrigan develops in nine short pages a world we care for and a love that we believe has a hope. Great stuff.

Rejection season comes for everyone in the playwriting game: even Shakespeare! A witty, irreverent fantasy that ponders just how Shakespeare would feel if Marlowe made it into the Liverpoolooza Summer Shorts Festival and he didn't. Plenty of short play fun.

In this new world, the simple things are more difficult than they have any right to be. In this charming, witty Zoom play, sexy talk is derailed by real life encroaching, politics, awkwardness and the pure artificiality of this new modality. Andrea Aptecker takes the inherent absurdity of hooking up in this new era and mines it for a fun, quippy take on the new world. Nice work!

This is a gentle, beautiful chronicle of a life lived with love, laughter, and heartbreak, and feels like an intensely personal purgation even while being witty, joyful, and (somehow) light. Williams infuses his characters with such life that you quickly learn to know them and love them, and ache for the what-ifs that stand between Allen and Philip. Lovely work.

Having dramaturged a handful of TJ Young's plays, I finally came to Dark Skinned Pavement fully aware of what he brings to the table: a poetic sensibility, a muscular voice, an uncanny ear for family dynamics, and an unerring rage for justice that barely bubbles below the surface. This reading blew me away as a play that we NEED in our society RIGHT NOW. As the shade of Martell flits around the edges, BJ and Harpo hang on by their fingertips, letting hope seep in to replace the dull ache that had been all-consuming. Stunning, vital, beautiful, wonderful. PRODUCE THIS.

A quick, incisive short by the always witty and insightful Jacquelyn Floyd-Priskorn. A cutting comment on self-worth, perception and this often brutal industry.

Steven G. Martin creates a meaningful, loving ode to self-forgiveness in his '153', where the version of a character at 45 lectures his own self at 18 as though he now has all the answers, only to be told by his own self at 90 that he hasn't even begun to learn yet. An ode to self-love and care, to accepting that mistakes make us who we are this world, and to realizing that we have never quite finished learning. Lovely and heartrending. 90 hugging 18 and forgiving 45 is a theatrical moment of beauty.