Recommended by Lisa Dellagiarino Feriend

This short play is precious!! I don't want to give anything away, but it is so sweet - bittersweet, really - and the conclusion isn't at all what I was expecting, but it was absolutely perfect. What a lovely short play for two middle aged actors!

What Gypsy Rose Lee's sister, June, thought about how she's portrayed in the famous musical about her sister is something I never thought about before, but Doug DeVita clearly has - and this play is about so much more than that. It explores the vast gray area between truth and fiction, and who gets to decide what will be settled on as truth. Should you fight to be remembered truthfully, or should you just be glad that you're being remembered at all? What an engaging, theatrical play!

Oh wow. This short solo piece about a father talking to his baby who miscarried at thirteen weeks about the grief that he feels, doesn't feel, and should feel is wonderful. I'm not a father, but the feelings expressed in this play about fatherhood are things that my husband and male friends have verbalized many times, and the tendency of the man in this play to beat himself up over not feeling enough or over doing the wrong things feels very universal to me. We all blame ourselves for things beyond our control, and this play nails that completely.

"Hey, Dad" is a beautiful eulogy of a monologue. It's told in such plain, simple language, and affects you all the more because of it. The bit about the books on his shelf and what they represented got me in particular. This is a very touching piece about a heartbreaking moment in a son's life, made even harder by the separation COVID necessitates.

In this engaging, quick-moving full length, Abraham, a Jewish New Yorker who recently moved to Tel Aviv after the death of his wife, learns that he is also the patriarch of a family of Palestinian Muslims. With a cast of just five (four of them great roles for women!), "Abraham's Daughters" tackles the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as the discrepancy between how one sees oneself and how one is seen by the world.

Unfortunately, this ten minute play, told so sparsely and so well, will never not be topical. What a beautiful distillation of America's policing problems. This should be produced everywhere.

Poking fun at the entertainment business, "Everything They've Told You" begins with Johnny Ciro being fired from his job playing a millionaire property and wind farm developer on an environmental charity soap (which - can we please have a spin-off play of that soap opera? Because that sounds hilarious.) Then Johnny disappears. Is he dead? Or is he a marketing genius? With lots of silly details and a central character you never see, this is a very clever short play!

I don't have enough compliments for this play. It begins with a couple 30 weeks pregnant being told no heartbeat can be detected, and then it alternates between moving forward in time and returning to that day, preparing to give birth. It is beautiful and heartbreaking. One moment that got me was the observation that we use language to understand our world, but there is no word for parents of a dead child, so you don't understand who you are. So much weighty stuff articulated perfectly. I am going to be thinking about this play for a long time.

Best ending stage direction ever. Ashleigh (who I have decided is the same Ashleigh from “Ashleigh Says Out Loud the Thing She Meant to Say in Her Head”) is up to bizarre shenanigans in her neighborhood, and her neighbors take it all in stride. My favorite thing about this two-minute play is that no explanations are given to the audience or sought by the characters. Five stars. Read this play, but hide your rake- Ashleigh’s coming.

What must it be like inside Daniel Prillaman’s mind?? I began this one-minute play thinking to myself that we’ve all said things out loud that we should have kept to ourselves, so in a way, we’re all Ashleigh. But then I read it, and we are NOT all Ashleigh. What a hilarious twist! I love a one-minute play that surprises you.