In this episode of Present Process, Daniel talks with Scott C. Sickles about his play Marianas Trench.

The goal of Present Process is two fold: first, to highlight great plays from lesser known playwrights and elevate them as much as we can; and second, to demystify the process of writing a great play and increase the shared knowledge of playwriting.

SCOTT C. SICKLES (he/him/his) is a biracial Korean American / LGBTQ / neurodivergent writer. He has received five consecutive Writers Guild of America Awards for the daytime serial General Hospital, as well as eleven Emmy Award nominations. For more than thirty years, his plays have been performed in New York City, his native Pittsburgh, across the United States, as well as internationally in Canada, Australia, the UK, Hungary, Singapore, Indonesia, Lebanon, and Dubai.
Sickles was a 2019 O’Neill finalist for Marianas Trench, the first play in an alternate-history/speculative sci-fi trilogy. Marianas Trench was also a finalist for the 2019 Fratti-Fred Newman Political Playwriting Contest, as well as a semifinalist for Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s PlayFest 2019 and American Blues Theater’s 2019 Blue Ink Playwriting Award. The other plays in this trilogy are Pangea, a romance set in Antarctica over the first days of 2046 as the climate reaches yet another tipping point, and The Known Universe, which takes place during the final hours of sustainable human existence on Earth. Pangea was an O'Neill semifinalist.
Sickles holds an MFA in playwriting from Carnegie Mellon University and is a member of the Writers Guild of America, the Dramatists Guild, and the New Play Exchange. www.ScottCSickles.com

Content Warning: Political Extremism, Homophobia