Recommended by Lisa Dellagiarino Feriend

This short play is a delight! A teenager takes her dog to the vet because he accidentally ate a grape, but she ends up being questioned at the police station because her dog mauled the vet tech and is not quite what she says he is. The dialogue is fast and funny as you try to figure out who is right and who is overreacting, and the ending is perfect. This would be a standout in a night of shorts.

Wow, this play is wonderful. A white man from Ohio comes to Georgia in the 1930s to interview people who grew up enslaved and to record their memories for the government. The play deals with issues of truth - what is true, who gets to decide what is true, and how much can be truthfully told without revealing what you don't want revealed, as well as exploring issues of pride and shame, and how they are often wrapped up together. It's a wonderful representation of America between the Civil War and Civil Rights Movement, caught between slavery and freedom.

Oh my gosh, this took me back! I read it for the title, but it was better than I could have hoped. In this monologue, a young woman is saying goodbye to her dad, having packed her life up into a car she's about to drive to college and into the future. Even though none of the details of Cleo's life match the details of my own at her age, I was still nodding along with her as I read. Grace Everett has captured that restless, unsatisfied, seeking spirit universal to those on the cusp of adulthood. Just great.

Wow, this play is wonderful. In the not-so-distant future, all boys are required to get vasectomies when they reach puberty to avoid unwanted pregnancies, but one mother can't bring herself to follow through with it, and then her son gets a girl pregnant and this play is about the fallout. It jumps around in time to great effect and deals with issues of identity, family, and race, as well as body autonomy, yet never gets crushed or lost under the weight of all those issues. What a great piece.

This is one of those plays that I wish so desperately I could see live. Two scientists have discovered and captured a human who lives underwater. As they perform research to figure out all they can about him, they wrestle with the ethics of what they are doing and their captive's backstory plays out in shadow puppetry. It's a captivating story with some stage images (that tank! the projections! the shadows! the prayer movements!) that I would love to see on a stage one day.

I love a good play about Satan! (I feel like I should rephrase that, but I'm going to press on instead:) What really makes this short "It's a Wonderful Life" parody work so well is all the little details, which are so specific and so funny. I was laughing to myself as I read all the terrible things - past and future - that are Satan's doing. It's loads of fun watching Clarence help Satan get his groove back.

What a great concept, perfectly executed! Ms. Grinch has had enough - there's not room in the Grinch's too-small heart for both her AND his hatred of the Whos. A fun monologue for Christmas or anytime!

This short play is both very entertaining and also a reminder of all the ways our quarantine year was stressful and a struggle: trapped at home with our loved ones, we all started noticing character flaws and questioning why we chose to be with these people (right? it wasn't just me, right?), and artists had to find new ways to make money in a hurry. This play is a good mix of humor and the stress of disconnecting from people you can't actually disconnect from. It also manages to have some great physicality despite being a Zoom play.

This play has been on my list for a while, and I'm so glad I finally reached it. What a beautiful story of loss and love and conflicting emotions entwined together. There were so many wonderful, wise one liners that by the end I wished I had been jotting them down to remember them all. Deceptively simple, this play will leave you with a lot to think about. Just fantastic.

Wow, this play about race and theater and capital-A Art is fantastic. It follows Charles Gilpin as he skyrockets to fame in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, and the rise and fall of both Gilpin's relationship with O'Neill and Gilpin's career. Their fallout hinges on Gilpin's refusal to say one derogatory word (you know the one) which O'Neill peppered throughout the play. I've made my own share of "Don't change a single one of my precious words. They're all there for a reason" speeches, so hearing O'Neill make that argument in this context made me uncomfortable and made me think.