Recommended by Emmet L.F. Cameron

I love to see a play for older actors, & Irv & Sheila have a lot to play with in this sweet-and-salty 10 minutes. This piece could fit equally well on stage as part of an evening of holiday shorts, or as an entertainment offering in an actual nursing home. Wherever it’s seen, the audience will be reminded of the miracle of human connection.

Donna Hoke knows how to score a contemporary story like an opera, giving actors big characters & big ideas to play with while saying the kind of exquisite lines most of us only wish we could say in real life.

If this were an animated holiday special I would make my family watch it with me every year. The audio version on Gather By the Ghostlight is pretty delightful too!

The layers in this play are like one of those massive jawbreakers that cut your tongue. You’ve got men taking an idea from a woman for a woman who seeks revenge on men for violating women, twisted into a male sexual fantasy & simultaneously producing female copycats, all written from a woman’s perspective. The interplay between fantasy as in superheroes & fantasy as in how the human mind processes our wildest hopes & fears makes for a fresh take on these issues.

This play takes the horror truism that the unseen is scarier than the monster you show the audience & twists it in a way that’s almost cute — which is, of course, even scarier.

This short script is contributing to such big cultural work, uncovering, uplifting & humanizing the stories of the many LGBTQ+ people who resisted the Nazis & were so often both murdered by the enemy & erased by their supposed allies after the war. This script could be a valuable educational resource for young people both for its historic content & the powerful questions it asks about the choices people make when they have had every good choice taken away.

A well-constructed short that reminds the audience there is more context to every stranger whose behaviour may confuse or irritate you, whether or not you’re lucky enough to have their story rolled out for you in such a dramatically satisfactory way.

What if Dory Previn’s song “Esther’s 1st Communion” was a two-hander short play with 13-year-olds played by adults, & it got gayer by the minute? We don’t have to wonder, because Aly Kantor wrote it.

The production of this play on Gather by the Ghost Light is fantastic, & it's even more interesting knowing the seed of this piece is a true story from Mabey's own family. It takes a keen writer's mind to take a strange & silent moment from decades past & draw out themes of adult discomfort around race, gender & parenthood that still resonate today. [spoiler ahead] I love the little echo of Waiting for Godot in the ending that resolves with potential for connection & collaborative evolution.

This piece really makes the most of its 10 minutes to dig into the complexity of holding all the aspects of somebody close to you who has died, when those who were a little further from the centre might be able to hold a rosier vision of them.