Recommended by Steven G. Martin

"Balconies" is all about subtlety and subtext. Strayer provides just enough for an audience and the actors to realize the attraction between the characters. This is terrific.

This is a Romantic play about awe, grandeur, beauty, scale, scope, and transformation.

Sickles shows us a character who is so enraptured by his surroundings and things so everlasting and glorious that nothing else matters, even immediate physical pleasure. A bare stage never looked so glorious.

Lynett's storytelling skills are on magnificent display. Lynett uses staging, structure, dramatic irony and interweaving dialogue to showcase a character who, perhaps, is having second thoughts about her current life and reliving memories of her past. Lynett's love for this character, though, is balanced. She doesn't lead the audience to make judgments about either of the two scenarios.

Meet Bridey, whom B. E. Turner shows to be the most self-centered, proud, and oblivious person in New Zealand. "Bridezilla" is brief, tart, and lean farce.

Hoke unfurls the dramatic irony of "Are You Happy Here?" slowly and with care. Through finely detailed dialogue, the audience will see the other shoe hovering overhead, ready to drop. It's a shame for Paolo that he doesn't. This is marvelous dark comedy.

B. E. Turner's "Timbuktu" is the script in your short play festival that will delight, infuriate, confound, and thrill your audience. Some may cheer, some may roll their eyes, but it will leave an impact. It's a gift to actors, designers, and directors, and an inspiration for playwrights.

Simply, it's the story of a meal gone wrong (or gone well, depending on perspective). On another level, it is a gloriously self-aware example of and about irreal writing, filled with an underlying chaos and a comic rejection of reality. On another level, it's a chocolate souffle.

In "Capacity for Curiosity," we see the breath of life given just before the recipient is tossed into the deepest part of the ocean without learning to swim.

Pastor's play is my favorite kind of science fiction, showing what it means to be human. In this case, ambitious, cruel, and calculating. We feel for the robots in the script -- they have names, strong connections with others, and the most varied emotions throughout. Pastor uses structure, irony, and dialogue well.

Sickles writes about a relationship that breaks up for reasons beyond melodramatic ones, reasons that are subtler and more nuanced and human. They make "The Most Important Meal of the Day" more thought-provoking and emotionally powerful than other break-up plays.

But mature and grown-up don't equal staid and boring. There is plenty of drama in "The Most Important Meal of the Day" -- there are tactics and reversals of power aplenty. And -- while we get more about Linus's history than Rupert's -- there are dimensional characters to ground this multi-dimensional story.

No one is just a dumb, silent ogre. No one is just a rage-filled harpy. Not if they're created by Scott Sickles, who uses structure, direct address, irony, and image-laden dialogue to show audiences the depths of these characters' lives.

"Bulletproof Love" is a feast for actors willing to expose themselves and share emotions as raw and cruel and tender and beautiful as these. And audiences will be shaken.

Hopson irreversibly establishes an unnerving tone from the start of "The Delivery Man"; it never lets up. Actors will love the dialogue and actions, and there are visual and aural elements to push the conflict even further.