I used to think genre theatre was a hard sell with school administrators: too weird, too niche, perhaps not "serious" enough for a season. But box office numbers prove otherwise. Directors who program sci-fi and fantasy plays are finding that the genre fills seats, energizes student performers, and opens the door to some of the most imaginative design work a production team can do.
But the best SFF isn't just spectacle. It uses invented worlds to say true things about this one—about power, mortality, connection, and what it means to be human. These four plays deliver both: the crowd-pleasing energy of great genre storytelling, and the dramatic depth that's our company's hallmark.
Inner Sanctum opens with three Silicon Valley tech bros accidentally summoning Cthulhu through a mobile game, leaving a group of misfit teenagers as the only ones who can stop the end of the world. Wildly funny and genuinely scary, it uses the language of cosmic horror to ask something worth asking: what happens when we hand our lives over to systems we don't understand, and what does it take to fight back?
The Wall and the Woods follows Lily, who has spent her whole life protecting the walls of Nestuk, until a mission gone wrong lands her on the other side, among the people she was trained to fear. A thrilling fantasy adventure about loyalty, power, and what happens when the story you've been told turns out to be incomplete.
Gilgamesh is the world's oldest story, centering around the world's oldest antagonist: death. In this epic play, a king who has everything, loses the one person who matters and spends the rest of the play trying to outrun his own mortality. It uses gods, monsters, and the ancient world to ask questions that haven't gotten any easier, about friendship, mortality, and what it means to be human when you're also something more.
The Right Now centers on Asher, who has been living the same Monday for as long as he can remember, and he's the only one who knows it. He built the loop himself, after his mother died, because a world where time doesn't move forward is a world where nothing else can go wrong. It works perfectly, until Saicha starts to remember. A gripping, surprisingly tender sci-fi thriller about grief, control, and the moment you finally let time catch up with you.
Every script is free to read in full at gitelmangoodpublishers.com. Each title also comes with a free lesson plan and author essay, and Author Hour is available for any production that wants to bring the playwright directly to the cast.
-Jason