Recommended by Larry Rinkel

Round up the usual suspects, play it again Sam, a kiss is but a kiss, and let's all sing the Marseillaise while we're telling the playwright how to write their play while pretending we're not telling the playwright how to write their play. Of course the idiot respondents don't realize the title should really have been "Tangier"; otherwise this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

Literate and elegant, this face-paced comedy succeeds equally in simulating a musical fugure and in explaining the intricacies of Schrödinger's Cat in a manner that even a layman like me can (sort of) understand. It's an enigmatic, intellectually challenging play, and I mean that in a good way. But whether you get all the details or not, the dancing rhythms and lively pacing should charm you. And be sure to follow it with a quantini (page 42).

I don't pretend to understand the intricacies of Schrödinger's Cat, where apparently a poor kitty in a box can be simultaneously both dead and alive. But it sounds like Allan Baker does, and in this charming short piece he has created an entertaining, musically patterned depiction of this famous paradox in quantum physics.

Set in multiple time periods, Katherine Vodny's crisply-written play depicts the competing demands of career vs. family, with the pompous and oblivious geologist father, the mother yearning to break free and find a career in programming, the teenage daughter who marries the father's non-entity TA and comes to regret it, and the bright but sociopathic younger son. I especially liked the play's unpredictability; every time you think you know these characters, they do something to surprise you. You'll learn a few things about geology too, and there are interesting suggestions for double-casting.

Aglaonike, the first female astronomer, is ridiculed in ancient Greece by male scientists in the early scenes of the play, when she correctly points to errors in their predictions of eclipses. Mentored by the sorceress Erichtho and accompanied by her faithful companion Tiger (portrayed by a dancer), Aglaonike navigates a series of episodes that highlight Claudia Barnett's gift for exquisite language and lovely stage pictures. Not so much heavily plotted as beautifully imagined, this one-acter calls for a charismatic actor in the title role as well as clever stage design.

(Duplicate entry.)

During my brief stint as an adjunct (two years following the Ph.D. in 1977, before landing a full-time teaching job from which I was eventually denied tenure), I learned first-hand the plight of the adjunct as a poorly paid and overworked slave who takes the greatest teaching burdens while living a life with no expectations for advancement. Nothing's changed. Here Asher Wyndham portrays the desperation of such an individual who is reduced to occasionally giving blood to make ends meet. What a horrid fate for someone who has devoted so much time and effort to a life of the mind.

Charming. Two characters in search of an author. (And a playwright who meets Matthew Weaver in a dream.) When all these Matthew Weaver plays are collected, it's going to be quite a collection.

As my own play about Matthew Weaver implies, this proposal from M.W. himself that 40 of us should write plays about M.W. for his 40th birthday is yielding great fruit. Consider it a Festschrift, and let us hope all 40 are presented on a single program (via Zoom of course). Here Williams creates a charming fantasy of not-quite-requited but not-quite-unrequited love between two playwrights, and shows that through the magic of playwriting, one can surmount all geographical obstacles and transform real people into characters who can say whatever the playwright wants.

My cursory research into the Aimee Bender original shows that Osmundsen's evocative, lovely play has many original elements. Here a whole family metamorphoses at some point into other animal species, and the play questions what it is about seagulls, apes, salamanders, fish, etc. that so fascinates people that we'd want to abandon our human nature to become other forms of animal life. Are the changes experienced by Kim and her parents magically real, or just metaphorical? Either way, better not to analyze too much but instead just to experience the often surprising transformations the author has in store.