Recommended by Dan West

When things are tough, perhaps all you really need is a clown. Ray has been the victim of schoolyard bullying to the point that he is becoming truant. Clownie is….a clown (of course) who see through to Ray’s pain and stops to do something about it. A charming and sweetly funny short play that gets to the heart of a serious issue. Sometimes Good Samaritans wear floppy shoes.

We can’t all be fast. Sometimes the most we can hope for is to just not me amongst The Slow. In Georgia Xanthopoulou’s thought-provoking monologue, our well travelled narrator reflects on a childhood game of tag where the most favored get to set the rules that everyone else must follow - even if those rules keep changing every time we begin to catch them. The lessons learned in the schoolyard can last a lifetime.

Consequences come hard and fast in Paul Donnelly’s one act Cupid Agonistes. Brook Robertson knows how to love, unfortunately that love does not extend much past his prized Willy Stargell autographed baseball bat. And it is this lack of ability to properly cherish (or show fidelity to) the humans in his life that will lead to the complete undoing of the whole lot of them. A darkly funny and utterly merciless play.

Ed and Lorraine Warren are husband & wife and renown ghost hunters. But what if things behind the scenes are not as smooth as film and media would have us believe. John Busser’s comedic horror one-act takes us inside the mediation room as the couple, their lawyers, the judge, and a possessed Raggedy Ann doll invite us to participate in one of the eeriest (and most entertaining) divorce settlements of all time. A terrifically spooky short play.

What do you get when you mix existential absurdism with teen-age sexual angst and then add a heaping cup of slasher urban mythology (and perhaps a dash of post-postmodernism)? I’m not exactly sure; but, if it is anything like Adam Richter’s brisk one-act “Waiting of Hookman”, it is bound to be a treat. Will our two erstwhile lovers ever make it all the way? Hell, will they make it to first base? Ineffectuality has never been such fun. There is nothing to be done.

As if closing a mortgage wasn’t bad enough already. In Jonny Bolduc’s ten-minute SLOP, a young couple sits down at their bank’s office only to discover that their mortgage agent is an anthropomorphic LLM - and not an algorithmically astute one at that. The encounter just keeps getting weirder and wilder as we witness a simple banking transaction turn into a hilariously bad day for everyone - including the AI SLOP. Plus I learned a little something about candle making.

This ten minute paean to Hollywood slasher films delivers the good in terms as both homage and parody. Three young people flee into a cabin in the woods beat of survival from some unseen pursuer. As the keep making the same mistakes as their cinematic predecessors, a disembodied voice counts them down to their doom as fans of the genre keep tally and nod knowingly. The last line is a fantastic capper to a wonderfully fun celebration of horror nostalgia.

What starts as an awkward date two-hander turns into so much more as two young, Jewish grad students discover that perhaps there is more to compatibility than what we see on the surface. The shift from lightly comedic to profound starts subtly and then lands with impact, leaving the audience thinking about the state of our modern world while still smiling at Morey Norkin’s charming and insightful meet cute.

Everyone has had bad dates. But I will dare say that none of us have had a date like this. Dr. Toni is a professional, but even she is fully unprepared when her blind date shows up speaking only in misheard song lyrics (mondegreens). Then things just keep getting crazier when her date’s ex-lover shows up, apparently with the same affliction. Best of all, Arianna Rose’s clever use of the premise (and language) makes it all make sense in this hilariously comedic short piece.

Marvin is violently sensitive man trapped in a loveless, emasculating marriage who just wants a woman (any woman) to make him like a man again - or at least to listen to his sob stories. In this ten minute play, Ken Love carefully and deftly walks his audience along a narrow high-wire between sympathy and disgust, before pushing us off and letting us fall into the void - in the best way possible.