Recommended by Aly Kantor

I can't stop reading this play. It feels like a fantastic puzzle with no obvious solution, and the longer I fixate on it, the more I'm convinced that's the point. The audience, like Smith, doesn't quite have all the information, and yet we can weave a million webs in the negative space! Ripe with theatricality, the short play shifts swiftly from scene to scene with sound cues that feel as transient as the characters' identities. Who is the muskrat? Am I the muskrat? I DON'T KNOW!

This play is unquestionably silly, with witty one-liner after witty one-liner keeping it moving along, but damn, did it resonate on a personal level, too! I've spent a lot of time in meetings discussing how to make meaningful art in a highly commercial atmosphere with low audience attendance. I know these characters intimately and relate to the ennui of compromising artistry for the bottom line. The piece has a lot of very funny and compelling stage pictures, and I love the use of the scarves!

A very tiny play that, nevertheless, elicits very big emotions! If you don't say "Awwwwwwwwwwwww" by the end of it, that's a YOU problem, reader! Everyone can relate to this sort of tragic miscommunication, in which a well-meaning attempt to imagine someone else complexly doesn't go quite as planned. I love the stylistic choice to have characters narrate their actions—that is, until that lovely moment of, well... kairos! Bring this sad little almost-romance to your one-minute festival!

What a sublimely strange, spare meditation on what it means to be happy, and who your happiness is actually FOR. Is it an internal state, a performance, something you can only achieve after a life well-lived? I appreciated the reflections on transcience and the necessity of death in telling stories about joy. It's incredible how the dialogue alone made paradise feel claustrophobic. The fourth wall break right at the end was the perfect reversal!

Vegetable puns abound in this unexpected space opera about sentient vegetation (with some helpful tips about office microwave etiquette, to boot)! I'm a little offended by the coleslaw hate (have you ever been to a NY diner? We ALL eat the coleslaw!), but the rest of the play had me rolling! Designers would be over the moon to create the crazy foliage-inspired costumes in this bonkers comedy, and there are so many opportunities for inventive puppetry. Sink your teeth into this one!

A play loaded with characters so specific, from their stories to their speech patterns, that you can't help but fall in love with them even at their worst... and there is a LOT wrong in this sincere, endlessly absurd workplace horror...but so much more is right. Seeing yourself in this story (and you WILL - because never before has specificity felt so universal!) is devastating and illuminating all at once, but it means so much that at the end, I felt such a surge of hope. Timely. Incredible!

This play seems to have a patina of age about it —I'm sure I could be convinced it was an artifact of another time if the subtext (and, at times, the text) didn't feel so wild and contemporary! This one might make the Greeks blush! From page one, I was designing set pieces in my mind. I love how both poetry and vulgarity come through in the dialogue, and the opportunities for off-the-walls movement dramaturgy are delicious. This is a campy, balletic Bacchae, and it's beautifully bonkers!

I adore the theatricality of this play's simple, honest, direct-address storytelling, which puts the onus of design and spectacle on the audience. Of course, in a play this spare, every single ambient detail counts, which makes this short a dream for designers - especially sound and lighting designers! Most of all, I love the way this piece answers "the passover question" with such a cool, sharp reversal! This feels like the type of classic horror story that you might hear growing up! Chilling!

Ladies and monkey souls, if you are looking for an endlessly witty play full of authentic, laugh-out-loud banter in the strangest and most compelling setting imaginable, you will have a great time with these delightful, relatably broken sickos! I think I'd describe this as "a coming-of-age play for 40-something-year-old women." I love the symmetry of the structure, too - the chaotic beginning echoing the kind and incredibly satisfying ending. A fun play with so much depth and emotional heft!

I've heard the TSA lines at the airport described as "security theatre," but this play is REAL airport security theatre, featuring a tense, taut thriller! This piece is timely, deftly interrogating (though a series of interrogations, no less), the ways in which power can corrupt. The split stage offers an easy but highly effective sense of theatricality and complexity. The piece also makes it clear how difficult - and, simultaneously, how painfully simple - it can be to look out for others.