To take in the future Ruben Grijalva imagines is to constantly double-take. So richly, thoroughly and plausibly does he envision, in “Anna Considers Mars,” a world taking place not even a century from now that for half an instant, you have to remind your brain, “No, that hasn’t happened — yet.”

In his world premiere, humans wear glasses that allow them to set Instagram-style filters on themselves, so that to everyone else wearing them, they look slightly better than they do in real life. To keep Medicare fiscally solvent, there’s a “Personal Responsibility Act” that allows physicians to deny patients care if they don’t take care of themselves — by, say, smoking. In this era, you could think you’re having a heartfelt conversation with someone, but then that person turns out to be an augmented-reality ad; the only way to avoid it is to upgrade to a premium account with your fancy glasses.

That thoughtful dramaturgy is just one of the delights of the show, which opened as part of PlayGround’s Festival of New Works on Wednesday, May 22, at the Potrero Stage. Grijalva’s characters are just as complex, just as surprising yet deeply relatable, and they’re embodied by a superlative cast under the direction of Susi Damilano.

There’s conservationist Anna, who’s been dreaming of going to Mars since she was a child, when her mom, Renata (Wilma Bonet), posted a video that went viral of Anna lisping, slobbering, foaming at the mouth and writhing on the ground when humans first touched down on the Red Planet. There’s Renata herself, a guilt-tripper par excellence, even to the extent of demanding that Anna give up her dream. But even as the pair spar doggedly, pridefully, they’re also capable of breaking, giving way to the abiding love that undergirds even the cruelest words.

There’s Malcolm (Christian Haines), who takes a more pragmatic approach to space travel than Anna, his love interest. They’re on “the wrong side,” she says, leaving Earth for a second chance at civilization on Mars, while climate change and other woes ruin the humanity they leave behind. “Well, it’s the only side that’s going to make it, so learn to embrace it,” he says.

There’s also an endangered marsh slug embodied by Aaron Wilton, belching out delicious sad mooing noises, and a Minnesotan who hopes to make the Mars colony a Christian oasis. That’s Katie Rubin, with an accent as thick as syrup and the overweening personality to make her speech gush. There’s an augmented reality butler in Søren Oliver, who deploys robotic, then wizardly intonations, each to great effect, and a would-be Martian who identifies as a bonobo (Wilton, who now seems to be guided by his pelvis).

If not every scene or character contributes to the overarching story as much as it might, Grijalva always keeps firmly grounded in who his characters are, how they’re neither fully good nor fully bad, how they all butt up against impossible choices and have to keep going anyway.

The other production in PlayGround’s new works festival, Katie May’s “A History of Freaks,” remains clunky in this stage of its development, with a melange of predictable story lines as it follows a traveling circus with troubled finances. A prodigal son, Joseph (Patrick Russell), returns from a stint at a college to his home at the circus, now with newfangled ideas about how his old roustabout pals ought to run things. A book-smart skeptic of circus magic, Claire (Laura Espino), learns the empirical world might not be able to fully explain how circus works. A love triangle among Joseph, Claire and Eve (Elena Wright) pits Joseph’s old life against his new one. Still other plot points — forgotten mothers, conjoined twins — remain undercooked.

But the show, which opened May 15 under the direction of Doyle Ott, glimmers with potential in monologue. When Wright’s Eve, a high-wire artist, invites us into her stream of consciousness as she climbs a ladder, rung by rung, to begin her act, the result is as transporting as poetry. “I repeat palindromes to myself,” she says. “They are the same forwards and backwards; a palindrome is perfectly balanced,” and Wright invests each line with the weight of stepping off a platform to possibly plunge to her death.

When characters recount the history of circus and freak shows, the show evinces its brightest potential. There’s an endurance, a complexity to the tradition, dating to ancient Egypt and Rome, that ought to tell us something about ourselves. Whatever your hangup about yourself, May posits, “you just let that go” when you behold “real freaks.”

在这两个富ll-length productions in this Festival of New Works (which also includes 10-minute plays, readings and shorts by youth artists), the actors shine. Russell in “A History of Freaks” can create multihued urgency when he’s just a happy-go-lucky bloke with his hands in his pockets, taking in the circus. In “Anna Considers Mars,” Ortiz and Haines (who are married in real life) make their characters’ budding romance shimmer with possibility.

Their performances are testaments to how theater can only exist as a sum of each artist’s contributions. Even in a festival dedicated to writers and their development, it’s the actors who make art come to trembling, indelible life.

“A History of Freaks”:凯蒂会写的。导演by Doyle Ott. Through June 15.

“Anna Considers Mars”:Written by Ruben Grijalva. Directed by Susi Damilano. Through June 16.

$11.50-$46.50. Potrero Stage. 1695 18th St., S.F.http://playground-sf.org