Recommended by Lisa Dellagiarino Feriend

What a clever short play! Four masks gather in a support group for discarded COVID masks. I hope this play has many productions because, years from now, when the details and the feelings from this past year and a half are fuzzier, this play will be a great reminder of what this time was like.

A play about a teenage vampire hunter who writes Buffy slash fiction? YES. This play is in turn compelling, creepy, surprising, sweet, and one of the fastest reads you'll find. I thoroughly enjoyed it!

I was lucky enough to see a production of this play in Chicago ten years ago (I am, myself, one of the girls who loves Bobby Kennedy) and what a pleasure it was to reread it on NPX. "All the Girls Love Bobby Kennedy" captures the spirit of being young in the late 60s, as well as articulating so beautifully what the U.S. lost when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Such a lovely play.

Astor Place tells the story of the 1849 Astor Place Riot using a large cast of characters (including some famous cameos!). It jumps around in time as the story unfolds, allowing you to both watch as events rush toward their inevitable conclusion and simultaneously witness the fallout afterward. For someone who used to live very close to Astor Place, I sure didn't know a lot of the details of what happened there. This play was the perfect way to learn. Famous people who feel they've been wronged have been inspiring their supporters to acts of violent chaos long before 2021.

What has Pac-Man been up to all these years? Turns out he’s down on his luck, but Blinky (who went back to school and got his MBA!) has a proposition for him. This short play is so clever and full of jokes that I loved for their intricate details. I would love to see this live for the staging of the final showdown (and to hear the sound of Blinky walking!) Tom Moran’s plays never disappoint.

This short play is wonderful! At first glance, it's about protecting a feral cat from coyotes, but then you realize that it's about much more than that. The banter between the sisters is quick and funny, but then suddenly becomes deep for a moment before reverting back... So much in only ten pages. I love it!

This is the best, best kind of bizarre. A man did a report in school about Johnny Appleseed when he was young, and Johnny Appleseed has haunted him for TWELVE YEARS. Is a monologue in which a grown man tells the ghost of Johnny Appleseed to scram funny? Oh my, yes. It's terrific, and the ending made me laugh out loud.

Regretting having slept with someone may be a relatively common feeling, but the someone in question being a zombie is not. In this hilarious monologue, Clara belatedly freaks out about how close she came to dying, and does some deep (for a woman who didn't realize she was having sex with a zombie) thinking about who is more dangerous: zombies, or regular, rotten humans? Super fun and a great comedic monologue to use for an audition!

What a terrific play! "Can't Live Without You" finds Donny, a writer of successful if uninspiring romance novels, working to meet his deadline when Bobby, the protagonist of his unfinished Great American Novel, shows up and makes him take a long, hard look at his life. The characters are rich and layered, the dialogue is engaging, and I love all the the little theatrical moments, especially the scene in which two of Donny's characters appear, interact, rewind, and start again as Donny writes and deletes, writes and deletes. Then Bobby starts interrogating them, and it's pretty much perfect. So good!

Wow, this short play is devastating and so, so good. A quick read with a gut punch of an ending, "To Fix a Dinosaur" is wonderful work.