Recommended by Larry Rinkel

Mr. Cohen, I suspect, must be a fan of Wagner's "Ring Cycle," for his chosen poetic method - what Wagner called Stabreim while we would just say alliteration - is the perfect paradigm to portray the pompous portentousness of the play between the protagonist and the prophetic princess. The radical shift in voices within the character Veleda herself, and the contrasts with the girl Edda (also a Norse mythological name), all contribute to the fun Cohen achieves with conventions of language, myth, and the nature of womanhood.

This play, which I saw read at the Midwest Dramatists' Conference in 2019, is an example of the sub-genre you might call "older me-younger me," which you can also see in the musical "Fun Home" and Tom Stoppard's "The Invention of Love." Having read several of Ms. Esposito's short plays, I would say her usual gambit is to contrast the put-upon character with the one who pushes her buttons. Yet even though the subject here is grief and loss, somehow there is a lightness of touch that makes the play refreshing.

Victoria Esposito has such a charming, unaffected way of exploring a young woman's anxiety about her appearance and sexuality, as reflected in the mirror which represents all those self-doubting and self-critical voices the girl has in her head. And of course there's the problem with Mom. At the same time the play is genuinely amusing, it also depicts the sadness of negative body image that plagues so many young women, and possibly women of all ages.

The age-old problem of getting into the bathroom when your roommate hogs it for what seems eternity. And especially when you're a shorter girl and your roommate is a tall hot shirtless guy you have a crush on. Esposito's charming young people and sexually charged dialogue are both delights, and just when you think the girl will never get into the bathroom she turns the tables and gets past the hunk guarding the door. Nice TYA piece with just a couple of F-bombs.

Always kind of fun to juxtapose fictional or historical characters from different time frames and environments, and see where they go when put together in the same room. Here cantankerous, blind Oedipus shows he's still got a lot of venom as he anticipates a murderous revenge against the thugs who raped his caretaker Liz. You know, Lizzie Borden, the sweetheart with the axe.

We don't know why the relationship is failing, other than a hint at the end about having a baby. But for the most part Weibezahl portrays this relationship from the exterior, as two people locked into a chronic low-level irritation with each other from which neither can break free. Instead of delving deeply into motivation, the author instead relies on the power of metaphor - mission, cemetery, camera, etc. - to create the restrained but deeply touching texture of his drama.

Underneath the zany humor, Ms. Vansant's clever play raises the question of who we really are: are we "ourselves," or are we the masks we put on to suit a variety of social and business situations? In this case, of course, it's the job interview, that egregiously stressful process where we are confronted with all those insidious questions where the slightest false move can spell the difference between being hired or not. "What kind of cookie would you BE?" For a number of reasons, I would cast a single actor as all the bosses, since they're wearing masks too.

Watch here for what a gifted writer can do with almost invariably short, simple sentences, even fragments. The tempo of this piece is extremely slow, the dynamic level extremely soft, as each character speaks as reticently as possible until some degree of trust has built up and each reveals something: an adulterous relationship (she), the loss of a mother (he). The prognosis for these two after the boat docks is unknown; the age difference is intentional. But for the moment, the two are united in a common goal, to cast mom's ashes into the Bay.

The play gets stronger as it goes on, leading to a final confrontation between the desperate, destitute addict and the cousin from whom he is begging an excessively large sum for his rent. But as I see it, the man's final gesture — refusing to take the much small amount of $20 he legitimately won at dice — is like an attempt to assert the tiny bit of dignity and independence he still has left, as his world crashes down and death is not far behind the "end of play" indicator.

It is no small feat to enter into the mind of a child, particularly when the child (the male in this case) is somehow autistic. But this is not a case-study; instead, the play attempts to recreate a child's need to attach importance to her/his/their life by imagining they're saving the world. There are no wasted words, and it would be interesting for a director to decide the actors' ages which could be considerably older than 9 and 11. PS: I vote for Amelia as the elder, because her sentence structures are more mature.