Recommended by Maximillian Gill

Like much of his work, Gacinski portrays human behavior pushed to deeply unsettling extremes in this play. It is a dark and very difficult experience to read about the exploitation and abuse portrayed in this piece, yet the writer does not do it for effect or sensationalism. His interest is in exploring a character whose human failings have driven them to commit the worst deeds. Trigger warnings noted, this is powerful work.

I've always felt that a group of passengers stuck in a train car during a delay is just drama waiting to happen, but I never expected where Hayet takes the situation in this compact, absurdist piece. And just when you think you know what's going on, the writer throws in another swerve. The characters are all familiar and unique and interact in unexpected ways. A fine short play.

Hilarious! Sickles starts with an ingeniously simple premise primed to yield comic gold, and then he just goes for it, squeezing out every ounce of humor from this portrait of a little girl who fancies herself a bored socialite. The character description alone had me laughing, and it just gets better from there. I don't believe I've ever heard funnier uses of the words "taffeta" and "cravats." Just brilliant!

I am always impressed by a successfully executed period piece, and in this play Deray perfectly captures the spirit of a crucial time in the nation's cultural history when young people and members of marginalized groups were starting to push against the conservative strictures of the era, but the forces of the establishment were pushing back in sometimes brutal fashion. The ensemble is full of rich, individualized characters, and the writer's ability to keep them distinct and manage their arcs is impressive. At the heart is a poignant coming-of-age story. A significant work.

We've all been there. We've all felt like we were drifting apart from people who were once so close to us, because they were moving on to new lives that we couldn't relate to, or perhaps we were. And we've probably all felt what it's like to feel left behind by people who were fulfilling themselves in ways that were out of reach for us. All of these feelings are laid bare in this poignant piece. We feel for all of the characters and brace for the tragedy that we know is sure to come.

Anthropomorphized animals provide a fun and novel way to examine the immigration/refugee debate, and the writer does a fine job of embodying "elephantness" and "camelness" in dialogue, but Rice goes deeper and darker, taking us on a journey that ends in a poignant place and a plea for mutual understanding. A powerful short for our times.

I was easily taken in by the nostalgia quality of revisiting 1999, but Dwyer's gifts are clearly not limited to evoking this particular place and time in cyberspace. The characters are very engaging, and we immediately feel for them as they try to negotiate their desires and desperate insecurities. We see the Hub as both refuge and prison, just like all insular communities. Dwyer's feel for the specialized dialogue is instinctive and never feels contrived. It reads briskly on the page and would be very interesting in a staged version.

At first I appreciated the fresh take on the "who wrote Shakespeare's plays genre," but Cross has done something much more interesting. The automaton at the heart of this piece serves as a means of exploring the nature of theatrical representation itself and what we are really trying to do when we write drama and poetry. The reflections on love and its expressions are some of the most interesting I have encountered in a while. I also have to comment on Cross's ease with the dialogue, which sounds convincingly Elizabethan but never stilted or awkward. A major achievement overall.

The artfully wrought dialogue is such a pleasure to read and easily sucks you into this Gothic-inflected thriller. It would be a true joy to hear actresses with the right sensibility embody these characters because I could just listen to the tea talk for a very long time! Their banter and some truly inventive stagecraft keep you hooked all the way to an ending that feels both unexpected and well prepared for. A fine short piece from a writer who seems to be able to do anything.

Cross has taken on quite a challenge with a two-hander in which one character barely strays from a few prepackaged phrases, but what the writer does with this simple premise is astonishing. After a variety of comic beats familiar to anyone who has ever been frustrated with an electronic device (in other words, everyone), the play goes to a place of beauty and loss that absolutely took my breath away. The close is both unexpected and perfect. Read this compelling piece now, before it becomes our reality!