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

A complex, thorny, compelling play with a fierce and smart ending. Although I struggled with the dialogue and exposition in the early scenes, I found myself swept fully into the communicative world that Teddy and Anzor managed to build for themselves across boundaries and threats, and the ending, again, is painful in precisely the right way. There's a range of rich queer male roles in this play. I would be excited to see it produced!

"Marianas Trench" is epic in scope, but so poignantly intimate, specific, and nuanced in its focus. Sickles manages to brilliantly render a hypothetical reality that is richly detailed and overwhelmed with potent social conflict through carefully crafted scenes--the epitome of excellent "showing vs. telling" with regards to theatrical world-building. Anzor and Teddy's relationship is compelling and evolves organically. The visual/spatial/aural world established here would be a dream for actors, directors, and designers alike to dive into. "Marianas Trench" is a powerful piece in and of itself, and leaves me wanting to know more about this world--produce this!

Everything about this play absolutely stuns. In “Marianas Trench,” Sickles envisions a terrifying world after America’s second civil war, where politics, religion, racism, bigotry, and ideology have fractured blue states from red beyond repair. And reaching across the rift are two young men, desperate to connect with one another via government-redacted pen-pal letters. Our hearts ache for Anzor and Teddy, each on their own private journey of self-discovery. The imagery employed in this work is breathtaking, and leaves room for beautiful stage pictures to be created by designers, directors, and performers. Expertly crafted storytelling.

This is a huge play, not only in pages, but in scope, emotion, and ambition.
The political scope of this play looks to our past, our history of suffering and suppression, but also to a possible Atwoodian future for a fractured America. Two countries, north and south, liberal and conservative, one for all faiths, the other Christian dominionist, are in contrast as well as the lives of two families and two boys.
Empathy, love, desires, and dreams takes on political, life-threatening significance.
A highly imaginative, structurally ambitious play that will challenge every artist involved.

I finished reading part one and I am revved up for part two! This is a sci-fi dystopian story about people on separate sides of a border creating a strong connection.
Can you believe there could be a world where refugees from Chechnya might have a harder time in the U.S.? You will learn about the bottom of the ocean and enjoy the suspense.

Set in a divided red-blue America, Sickles's exciting play traces the evolution of a pen-pal friendship between two precocious and lonely pre-adolescents. Even the most innocent sentences in their letters are (hilariously but also chillingly) redacted, as nerdish Teddy suffers from relentless bullying while Anzor's Chechen (and formerly Muslim) family is in true danger living in fundamentalist Christian Arkansas. The play asks what it means to be an American when we are all immigrants and even a kid with an Italian last name is really Korean. I was fortunate to attend a superb staged reading in NYC, July 2019.

I had no idea what this play was about when I started it and I am so glad I didn’t. It left me breathless in the that best possible way. What Sickles accomplishes in this masterful tale would take eighty-eight recommendation fields to come close to feeling I have said all I can say with all the things this play does right. And I am left with a hunger to read Parts Two and Three. Masterclass delivered!

My goodness. What an incredible play. Sickles has crafted an architecturally-rendered structure, with gorgeous bones and exquisite detailing. But it's the people, these characters, these kids - Teddy and Anzor - whose deep expression and imagination burn with a filament of bright energy, that refuses to fade away into the incongruous, tattered world around them. Without being ham-fisted or maudlin, Sickles takes on our political and environmental precariousness, our voyage into a strange new world. Not since seeing and reading EM Lewis's "Magellanica" has a play hit my head and my heart so hard. A beautiful work. Bravo!