Recommended by Franky D. Gonzalez

Going back and forth between grief and lightness at a turn of a phrase. Emily Hageman encapsulates the strengths and strains of a marriage navigating one of life's most heartbreaking obstacles. In between sock monkeys, banana puns, and a heart-to-heart conversation that makes you want to let out every feeling and hold them all in at the same time, Hageman covers the spectrum of emotions that lead to a conclusion that is both human and something much more. You ache for these characters and you want to see it all work out. Hageman has given me faith it will.

A really nice and breezy read if you want a short play filled with love and affection for reading new work. The love of literature and reading between two characters is absolutely palpable in this short but wonderful tribute to being a book enthusiast. Whether or not you've read Sky Burial, you feel by the end of this piece to be familiar with it and want to get a copy as soon as you can. Weaver does a great job of both advocating for broadening literary horizons without sacrificing good dialogue or rhythm in this piece.

Hometown memories, shared pain, commiseration, and whiskey bring two women together at a bar. Their conversation unfolds and you half-expect what's going to come, but even with that expectation the play keeps you engaged. You want the same answers to the questions that are asked. You want solutions. You want things to end well. How this play ends is something that the reader should find out with reading this play by John Bavoso. It's worth the read.

A really interesting piece that gives new life to a very ancient legend. This is one of those plays that you have to read to really understand, as a review can easily give away what's in store for any prospective reader. Suffice it to say, Lindsay Partain is very talented in the way she's able to distill and bring a play to its very essence and core. She accomplishes that here in wonderful fashion. I can't wait to read even more of her work from here on out.

A tender story about unlikely relationships and the secret guilt held by regret and heartbreak. Bavoso creates a story that you think is going to go one way, but delightfully goes an entirely different direction and reveals new facets to a story that we think we know. John Bavoso has an amazing gift for making a plot twist both impacting yet so natural you almost miss it's a plot twist. Kylie and Janet and Robyn and Cher is a lovely play the is both funny and heartwarming. I highly suggest reading it.

An chilling play that you wish was more fiction than reality. Minigan presents an inventor who creates the manifestation of the American contradiction. Worse yet, it's not a far stretch of the imagination to see this seeming contradiction of a product flying off the shelves were it introduced to the mainstream market. Read the monologue. No words can really do justice to that unsettling ending. Part prophecy, part dramatic conceit. This monologue delivers a wallop, and doesn't miss the target.

A funny comedy that updates a fable to modern time with a play on words and putting these two characters in our highly connected world. As this couple goes a day without technology to watch the clouds, the rifts in the relationship--seeming to come from much longer ago than this conversation--start to show. What Burdick does however is show that there is hope even under the rain and the winds of change can turn a rain cloud into something more lovely than what was there before. What a pleasant play!

A play that explores the depth and strength of friendship after a life-altering event. The dialogue leaps out at you with its realism of cadence. For so few pages, it presents so many questions, problems, resistance, and solutions. A fascinating play that bears consideration. DeCarlo has a wonderful sense of rhythm and keeping things both vague while still being engaging.

Pflaster pulls off combining Walt Whitman, Superman, Batman, affairs, marriage, love, and a coffee shop together in this little gem of a play where we learn that communication between lovers means miscommunication--at times--of the largest scale. Two lovers--or boyfriends? Maybe manfriends?--look to be calling it quits until they begin to talk, perhaps for the first time, and realize aspects of each other that may not have been clear through years of rendezvous. With clear dialogue that gracefully walks the line of witty with the plain-spoken. It's a play that you'll chuckle over and leave you thinking.

A wonderful nightmare about acceptance, equality, and the straddling the line of two cultures. Art Por Diaz creates a world where having to choose becomes an humorous exercise in impossibility. There is so much heart and tenderness here that children will love, with whispers of the themes that parents of bicultural children have to reckon with. A beautiful play about a boy and his two would-be scary monsters. This is a play that needs to be seen in more children's theatres.