Recommended by Jillian Blevins

A funny and tender holiday play about grief, loss, love, and new traditions. THE UNEXPECTED DELIGHT OF SNOWBIRDS has so much going for it: plumb roles for older actors, snappy dialogue, great visuals, and creative insults that would make Shakespeare nod appreciatively; most importantly, at its center there lies a relatable truth about how grief is heightened during the holidays, and a moving example of the ways we can hold each other through it. This short would be an excellent addition to any holiday festival.

In this feminist examination of Dickens’ archetypical tragic spinster, John Minigan’s impressive research skills are on full display. In fact, they’re part of the play itself, as an actress who identifies with Miss Havisham tries to understand why Dickens created her as he did, why she died, and how her loneliness, pride and shame may be reflected in her own life—even as she insists that unlike her subject, she is happy and free. Part adaptation, part literary criticism, and part true crime investigation, this one-woman show packs a well-earned emotional punch.

An astonishing play. In rhythmic cadences evocative of heartbeats, dripping water, tides, three characters endure a slow-motion apocalypse and the human need—and fear—of being known.

FF is about gender, and also transcends it. Tay, Jamerson’s nonbinary protagonist, speaks the play’s themes most directly: about their desire to exist outside of their body, and feeling most themself when not being perceived. Yet all three characters buck against the outside world’s attempts to define them, and posses a universally relatable desire to be embraced in all their contradictions, pleading “stop telling me I don’t exist”.

What makes a good person? Vince Gatton’s darkly comic existential road trip play doesn’t offer easy answers, but it does one better: it allows us to wonder.

YOU HAVE EARNED BONUS STARS is most powerful in its theatrical dream sequences, revealing its protagonist’s repressed shame and self-recrimination alongside a+ visual punchlines (a priest, a rabbi and an imam walk onto a plane…).

Surviving violence—or not—doesn’t erase your past or wipe clean your karmic slate. The beauty of YHEBS is in how it not only contends with nuance and moral ambiguity, it revels in it.

Spooky, punny, with a disdain for cardio and a queer romance? Sign me up! SECOND HAND SOUL is a Halloween short with a soft, gooey heart. Full of opportunities for designers to have a field day (both with atmosphere and the character of Damon) Ava Love Hanna’s spooky-season offering would be a highlight of any festival. While the overwhelming experience of the play is fun and silly, there’s a moving thread exploring how a religious upbringing can continue to fill us with fear and shame, even when we think we’ve grown past it.

EYES OF PUREST GOLD is, on one level, a fable about the sin of greed; like King Midas, this father’s obsession with wealth ultimately harms his child. More interesting, however, is how the play itself is a series of nested dreams, eschewing traditional structure in favor of nightmare logic that feels both authentic and unnerving. Also at play are Cross’ theatrical footnotes in the form of student presentations. In these structural elements, the play calls to mind the cult horror novel “House Of Leaves”—and like the famously re-readable tome, EOPG is a labyrinth you’ll want to renter.

Someone used Clay’s gun to do a bad thing. Now he needs the gun to protect himself from the forces that want him to pay (both human and decidedly not). CASSIE STRICKLAND… is part of Gatton’s broader storyline about gun violence and its impacts; the depth of the world-building, character backstory, and blanks left to be filled in makes this parable about guilt and responsibility stand on its own, and stand out from similar ten-minute plays.

THE LABORATORY is perfect Halloween-play-festival fare: satirical and spooky, with a hilarious juxtaposition of genre.

This dynamic, raw, breathtaking one-woman show transforms a lonely experience into a communal one, inviting audience members (both in-person and remote) to experience the playwright’s journey of infertility and IVF alongside her. The audience participation component is much more than a gimmick here: whether playing doomed sperm, the playwrights empathetic mother, or even sharing their own single-word reasons for wanting babies, the audience’s role in the storytelling is full of meaning and purpose. The ferocious honesty and vivid theatricality in Duerr’s script have created that rare autobiographical play in which the personal becomes universal.

A taut domestic tragedy set against the backdrop of the unthinkable horror of filicide, FERTILE GROUND explores a dark (and relatable) niche of the human psyche. O’Grady’s layered characters each look at each other and see someone who has what they themselves desperately desire—a child, a loving partner, freedom—and who has taken it for granted. The tragic action unfolds when that assumption leads them to betrayal, and worse. Most intriguing is the hauntingly spare characterization of Willa, whose horrific crime throws the rest of the play into stark relief.