←Recommendations of Marianas Trench (Part One of The Second World Trilogy)

An achingly beautiful portrait of adolescent first-love managing to grow, despite the dystopian world Teddy and Anzor find themselves existing within. From the first otherworldly description of the anglerfish to the final monologue, it is a deeply impactful and IMPORTANT story. I am so grateful to have experienced this story by reading it, and I cannot wait to see it realized on stage.

The highest praise I can offer: the perfect synthesis of Anne Frank, George Orwell, and Stephen Spielberg. And yet frighteningly plausible. A must read. Super-highly recommended.

With no hyperbole, I am blown away by what I can only identify as a piece sure to be realized in the coming years as one of the greatest American dramas of this era. This play is thunderous and immense, poetic and heartbreaking, tender and raucous, and is as dense as the ocean with meaning. Sickles’ alternate timeline is masterfully executed, feeling both all too real and all too possible, and wraps a delicate story of loss, pain, need, and hope into the relationship forged in words (said and unspoken) and wonder by two young boys. HIGHLY RECOMMEND.

I watched a Zoom reading of MARIANAS TRENCH and was so captivated I immediately found the rest of the trilogy on here on NPX and am immersed in the rest of the story. Scott Sickle imagines an alternate history of present events, but from the point of view of two 11-year-old boys who share the move beautiful bond. Tensions are high, and the world is falling apart, but the daily struggle of being if 5th grade is equally as heart wrenching. BRAVO! So magnificently done! I encourage everyone to check out this play! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

You will go on a journey. You will go on a heartrending, hilarious, true, and beautiful coming-of-age story in a dystopia that daily looks less and less like fiction and more and more like our inevitable future. Scott Sickles has created at once a love story and an indictment of this country in MARIANAS TRENCH. More people should know about this play. More people should read this play. More people should be clamoring for its production. This play is a bolt of lightning and a call for us all to come to our senses before it's too late. Highly recommend.

In every way haunting, the play's modified epistolary form is expertly mined for character revelation and "only connect" moments that are heartrending. The use of the oceanographic lexicon as the poetry of a slowly developing, fully earned love story is brilliantly original, eccentric yet recognizable; as Sickles' multidimensional people demonstrate so eloquently, in youth more than any other time, we reach our hearts through our budding intellect. These two boys, achingly yearning and unfiltered, find one another under the sea, the science downright magical; their shared badinage becomes as potent as Cyrano's extemporanea. Endearing characters, unforgettable storytelling.

The Portland Stage provided a very engaging reading of Marianas Trench, which I had the pleasure of seeing. Scott Sickles dystopian universe is a place not so far from our own, where we find ourselves rooting for two boys who long for one of life’s simplest pleasures, friendship and connection. Wonderfully drawn characters and a plot that holds you, Marianas Trench is a play we want to see.

Scott Sickles has given us a dark reflection of who we are and where we may be going as a nation and as human beings. It is hopeful and it is bleak; it is terrifying and it is humorous; it is the story of a world brought about by hate, yet it is filled with love.

You can't help becoming instantly invested in the characters, especially Teddy and Anzor, two remarkable 11-year-olds whose intelligence and sensitivity may be their undoing or salvation in a world we must avoid.

A remarkably timely, and human, piece of alternate history science fiction.

By telling a story of two families linked by the pen-pal correspondence between two eleven-year-old boys in an alternate timeline divided America, Scott Sickles provides a defamiliarizing lens from which to examine the tensions in our own society. Students of history and human rights will hear echoes from other tyrannical regimes. Sickles' characters are psychologically complex, from the adults attempting to raise children who can survive in a new cold war era to the tween protagonists dealing with the anxieties of a growing awareness of the larger world, and escaping into a shared world of words and imagination.

This is a heartfelt and often heartbreaking play that explores the emotional depths the title suggests. Its alternate world is frighteningly close to ours but, despite the horrors inflicted on both sides of its imagined national border, there is light in the depths, and care and possibility to be found in love and compassion. A gorgeous work that, given how richly its world is imagined, could be as stunning on stage as it is on the page.