←Recommendations of Tesseract

Days after seeing New Art City’s superb reading of TESSERACT, I'm still parsing the layers and textures of Sickle’s haunting play. Few plays capture the zeitgeist like this dystopian thriller … or have its keen sense of urgency. It perfectly captures our individual and collective anxieties during the stressful and often hateful times we find ourselves navigating. TESSERACT needs to be produced NOW, not later, and the theater that dares to take it on deserves all the kudos it will receive.

Convoluted reality may be represented by a tesseract - which is often used to conceptualize space-time. Here, Scott Sickles takes our world and current trends and pushes it through the tesseract to an irrational and disturbing conclusion. It’s an intelligent, artistic gut punch. Sickles has a knack for creating vivid dystopian worlds with gorgeous dialogue. This is fully on display with Tesseract. An interesting read, it would be absolutely captivating on stage. Beautifully heartbreaking.

[2025-06-26]

The universe that Scott Sickles builds here is rich in detail, terrifying and all-too-recognizable as one we might soon inhabit. But while the play is set in a secondary world, the core issues — treatment of trans people, children going missing, the evaporation of LGBTQ+ rights — are viscerally recognizable in our own world, in our own timeline. "Tesseract" is yet another brilliant play from Scott that needs to be read, seen and felt.

I didn't realize black words on a white page had the power to induce stomach cramps and nausea, but such is the power of this prescient, devastating, and absolutely necessary script from Scott Sickles. Reading this play is a frustrating, heartbreaking, soul-crushing endeavor, and that's the point. It's such a rich, human-centered illustration of how a regime like this hurts EVERYONE. I am not sure a dramatic reversal has ever made me THIS angry before. Read this. Feel this. And remember this.

I love Scott Sickles's plays. He can do it all: period pieces, romances, and SciFi dystopias that leave us with a sense of hope that we can be better. (Can we? With people like Sickles in the world, I do have hope.) With TESSERACT, we encounter a world that would have seemed impossible ten years ago. It's devastating. It's Earth-Shattering. It's beautiful. I feel I will only echo what everyone else has said here, but this is truly a work that needs to be experienced. Haunting and necessary.

The feeling of "hope" in this play is so real. Yes, hope is a thing with feathers, but it also has a very sharp beak. TESSERACT as a whole is so many things at once, but it never muddies its message. The strongest of which is, loss is an empty feeling but hope scratches the raw edges of where love once was. I could see this play being a series because there is so much life in all of these brilliantly nameless characters. It makes you want to learn more about everyone. I "hope" we can.

Tesseract. Tough. Tender. Tense. And frighteningly possible. They're "putting people on planes and sending them anywhere?!?" Yes. But we don't have to place ourselves in another existence or dimension or another plane of existence to see the truth of what is happening, what can happen and what has happened throughout time. Excellent work.

Oh man. Scott Sickles. This play is a warning of the dystopian future waiting for us if we don't find a way out of our dystopian present. I love that none of the characters have names, underscoring that the situation the characters find themselves in isn't specific to them, but something that can and will happen over and over if far-right forces have their way. No one can shatter you with a well-written tragedy quite like Scott Sickles.

Oof. Compelling, gripping, maddeningly relevant. Sickles is Cassandra, shouting furious warnings to we in the audience as his ever-thoughtful words depict the walls closing in all around us.
I attended a reading of TESSERACT through Playwrights Thriving. One of the performers of that reading is in a Bible study, and its members were in attendance. Their pastor: "This WAS Bible study." Amen. May all audiences be paying as close attention, before it's even more too late.

This play is a prescient and brutal 90-or-so minutes from start to finish. I admire Scott Sickles as a writer on many fronts, but man, can Scott Sickles make you feel something viscerally. What I find especially astounding about TESSERACT is that we go through the harrowing journey of a missing child and the consequent strain on a marriage without naming a single character. This one will stay with me for a while, that ending was a gut punch. Excellent work; someone please produce this.