Recommended by Lisa Dellagiarino Feriend

This is the kind of play I would LOVE to take my kids to! Billed as "a fairy tale for those in transition" this is one of those rare plays that will captivate both children and adults. It has dialogue so simple, yet so profound. I found myself repeating lines aloud just to hear the sound of Aly Kantor's sage one liners and to try to remember them. Kantor's beautiful, broken world parallels our own beautiful, broken world, and there's a meditation on the color blue that is better than any poem I've read in a long time. Fabulous!

This comedy about a dinner party full of drama and elbows manages to deliver four nuanced characters, terrific dialogue, and a surprise twist in only ten pages. I loved how much was communicated just through glances and body language. In addition to being a stand out in a night of shorts, “Elbows” would be a treat for an actor - there’s not a bad role in the bunch!

What if one of the Weird Sisters renounced her witchy ways, checked herself into therapy, and now wants to move to Palm Springs and soak up the sun? This clever short delves into the lives of the Weird Sisters, giving funny glimpses of things that have happened because their magic doesn't work properly when there are only two of them. It's a delightful reimagining of some of Shakespare's most well-known mischief makers.

I must admit, with proper shame, that I have made it this far into my life without having read or seen Twelfth Night. That makes me living proof that you can enjoy the socks off of this play (basically Sir Andrew's origin story) without knowing anything about the story that inspired it. Plus now I will have the added joy of holding all of Toby Malone's delicious backstory in my head whenever I DO finally get around to Twelfth Night. There's adventure, there's intrigue, there's tragedy, there's dueling... Shakespeare couldn't have done better himself!

YES. A freshman has been cast as Lady Macbeth, and the jealous upperclassmen try to hide their envy as they get to know her. In addition to having pitch-perfect theater major dialogue, this play also touches on how few good roles there are for females in the plays that tend to get done in college. Maybe these girls would be less desperate, jealous, and macbitchy if there were more exciting female roles to go around. That's not an issue in this play, however, where every role would be a treat. What a great show for college-age actors!

Wow, this short is powerful. I was a teenager in the 90s and what little thinking I did about Don't Ask, Don't Tell was basically, 'Well good. Now that's fixed." I realized that was flawed thinking as I grew, but I never really thought about what it would be like to be gay and in the military in the 90s. Then I read "Sniper," and now I can't stop thinking about it. This short play accomplishes its goal in spades. What a great piece.

The feeling of being trapped is palpable in this short. The California wildfires are coming, but COVID is raging, so where is safe? When nowhere is safe, you might as well stay where you are and focus on the small things you're capable of doing to make it all more bearable. One line that stuck with me was, "Anything for more life." What a great short, tackling so many things in such a small span of time - how like a human life.

Whoa! Sound is used to maximum effect in this short, scary play. Being given gruesome and ominous sounds, and allowing the audience's imagination to do the rest of the work, is a very successful way to do horror on stage. Even the jazz music was scary by the end - and the silence was maybe scariest of all. I loved how invested this play made me, even though not a lot of background information is given to understand the very bizarre things going on. They say show us rather than tell us, but this play actually makes you FEEL it.

I love this! A group of theater makers gather to discuss doing a production of Hamlet. Suggestions for improvements - and accusations of exclusion - are hurled out, and by the end of the play, what they've come up with is not quite Hamlet, but definitely something I would by a ticket to. This short is smart and fun, and has the added bonus in this ongoing pandemic of able to be performed live or on Zoom. This play sounded like it would be fun, and it far exceeded my expectations.

This monologue is beautiful and sad as a son tries to prevent himself from dying with the regret his mother died with, and to somehow give her what she felt she had missed out on. Marcia Eppich-Harris reminds us that nothing is clear-cut and nothing is universal. Having achieved what his mother didn't get the chance to, her son ends up with his own regrets. What a beautiful snapshot of what it's like to be human.