Recommended by Larry Rinkel

This deft, fast-moving soufflé calls out for inspired staging, with its cast of five playing twelve parts and stage-hands carrying harpsichords and trunks in and out. The great Bach is trying to gather his favorite sons to play his new Concerto for Four Harpsichords, but keeping the boys in line proves too much and by the end he is reduced to playing the Italian Concerto for Solo Harpsichord. You don't need a knowledge of classical music to enjoy all the clever twists and turns, but it won't hurt to recognize the many musical quotations whistled by son Carl. Great fun.

This is so sweet, and crafted with a light touch. Best friends Danny and Rachel are ready to re-evaluate their relationship and make love for the first time (his first ever) on New Year's Eve. But complications ensue: her nosy friend Taylor, his nosy roommate AJ, how can you not watch NYE on TV, no condoms in today's pair of pants. Blackout and a kiss just when the ball drops, and fortunately there's a CVS just two blocks away.

The meaning of modern art is always ripe for satire, and Straton Rushing explores the topic in this charming small play. Many of the standard tropes about gallery-watching are here: the viewer who can't resist pedantically analyzing a simple painting of a church, the compliments to the performance artist's face that belie the viewers' actual disdain, the blank canvas presented as art. The deftest section in the play is the interplay between Robert and Sarah as they watch a video of performance artist Caeli as she strips naked and inserts cheese into her navel.

Who knows what those sweet old widows are doing when they hang out at the mall? Well, Sylvia has her eyes on the hot young twenty-somethings she likes to pick up to make her feel young. But this Christmas Eve, it's her more cautious friend Ethel who is the object of sexy young Miguel's attentions. Interesting questions raised here about sexuality of women and the elderly.

You can have "Jingle Bells" and "The Little Drummer Boy," but "Dominic the Chistmas Donkey" is the best Christmas song ever. How Signor Pangellini and his donkey wind up in an American doctor's office is beyond me, but enjoy Dan Guyton's hilarious little play for its inspired silliness and every pun imaginable on a certain part of the body where the sun don't shine.

How can you resist a play that features a character who first says "I hate Christmas" and later, "Christmas is triggering"? In just seven pages, Diana Burbano juggles at least a dozen balls in the air as her little two-hander deftly touches on race, income inequality, middle America, a bisexual father, liberalism, MAGA, gluten-free cookies, and no doubt more. It's a charmingly humorous piece, yet with a touch of sentiment as half-black, half-Jewish Martin proposes to Latinx Jaqui by offering an engagement ring taped to a Bernie 2020 pin.

From the start of "Personal Histories" I felt I was in the hands of a master craftsman who knew exactly what he was doing, and who shaped a tidy little noir with overtones of "The Maltese Falcon," hitting many of the key expectations of the genre in such a way that revelation after revelation unfolds in increasingly tense and exciting fashion. The play is well-paced, features snappy dialogue, seems well-researched in science and art, and I hope gets picked up by any theatre Jerry Slaff cares to submit it to.

In this 1-act atmospheric tale of a medieval knight rescued from death by a witch whom no one else can see, the witch comes to regret her decision to save the knight who doesn't love her and casts him aside to suffer through numerous lifetimes. Centuries later he achieves a momentary reprieve through the kindness of a descendant. Karen Fix Curry's tale achieves the ends of good folklore by suggesting that even though a world of witches and fairies may not literally exist, the fantasy of humans interacting with them can lead only to harm on both sides.

Yes, it means what you think. Shades of John Wayne and Lorena Bobbitt, this hilarious comedy for four women and a severed penis (its former owner's "only positive quality") has plenty of good farce to it. But it's also a tale of domestic abuse and spousal rape, complete with a female cop who'll look the other way if the evidence is destroyed. (Which it is, thanks to a friendly garbage disposal.) Meanwhile, Bakely has a wealth of ideas for how to put his eponymous prop through all kinds of humiliations; never has a disembodied penis suffered so.

Don't expect anything like a standard plot and characters from this strange but evocative dream-like fantasy of a man and two women caught in an endless ritual where they must play out a "session" that they can never get quite right. Images of sex, incest, self-mutilation, a violent father, genitalia sometimes gone missing, and a Frankenstein-like monster pervade this surrealistic tale. The dialogue and characters are strong and memorable even if I confess I'm not sure what it all means. But perhaps I'm not supposed to, and this is a playwright not afraid to take risks.