Recommended by Franky D. Gonzalez

Steven Hayet shows the depths of a mother's love and guidance to her daughter on the road to a successful career. It's a play with a lot of heart, laughs, and snark. It also shows parenting at its finest during the holidays. The gift Sydney gets may not be what she wanted but her mother had the foresight to know it's what she needed. It's a fun play that is perfect for any holiday series of shows.

Hayet takes the famous Shaggy song and turns it into a new play about owning up for one's misdeeds. Hayet fills us in on the playbook of the powerful and how they attempt to evade any reckoning for their past and also speaks at the conscience of so many who deny, deny, deny even in the face of overwhelming evidence. It's a play that embodies much more than the five-minute runtime appears to offer.

Steven Hayet has such a great command of pop culture and reality television monologue, I'm almost convinced he's the secret writer of many of these reality shows. This monologue gives us the essential template of every cheap attempt by a reality to show to get sympathy for a contestant. Best yet, it'll give you a chuckle or two as you have the formula thrown right back at you from every cooking competition show ever, while still remaining fresh and giving this template an air of originality.

There's a bit of a warm smile you get as these students bring even the smallest roles in a school play into the highest of stakes. Steven Hayet creates the kind of backstory you expect from theatre schoolkids and stands up for the kids finding joy in their imagination and turning a lesser role into something amazing. It's a fun play with some really great dialogue and rhythm. It would completely fit any school play event.

You think you know what's happening until the twist comes and makes you laugh out loud to find out the truth. It's the kind of play you want to see staged just to see how a theatre company can pull it off. A fantastical, and really enjoyable piece that throws curveballs and new twists from start to finish.

An action-thriller in ten minutes or less. Dominica has all of the hallmarks of a big-budget Hollywood movie, with punchy back and forth dialogue between the professor and her former student. There are subtleties and hints of the past that would be a delight for a director and actors to explore when tackling this fun and funny play.

This play is relentless in the examinations of social mores and dynamics that are usually written off as "just the way it is." Lindsay Adams creates a play that has its moments of humor but never losing the the gravity of a mother's love being tested by the alleged crimes of a son. It's a play that makes you reevaluate preconceived notions along with Jen as you take this journey with her. The play has wonderful levels and dialogue that actors and directors can grasp quickly and bring to life almost effortlessly.

A quirky and hilarious exploration of what the characters of an unread story feel when the reader is distracted. Two stories in two different worlds, bound together in the most unlikely ways create this mime piece. Yes, a mime play is the medium that explores teenage love and a medieval quest of true love and bravery. It's the kind of play that you want to see mounted to see how the director and technical team pull off the logistics while the actors pull of the acting in this brief but highly entertaining play.

How one processes the profundity and spectrum of emotions that come with with loss is difficult to define. So too, this play is difficult to define and leaves so many questions which allow for one to fill in those gaps with the range and spectrum of one's own losses and private griefs. Emily Hageman presents a couple making sense of unfathomable tragedy trying to find "Fine" again. It's a play that bears repeated readings and perhaps repeated processing. Take it in, and read this play aloud to hear the depth of these two in how they deal with pain.

There's a bit of melancholy in the stream-of-consciousness of a hyperactive kid trying to be his father's child. For all the hyperactivity and flittering thoughts of River, you discover a child that wants to be loved and has complex thought-processes that speak of the adult to come. It's a sweet, funny monologue and one that completely subverts your expectations of someone in this kind of situation.