"Pilgrims" follows an unnamed soldier (Ed Flynn) and a teenage girl (Janelle Villas) on a spaceship as they make for a colonized planet, accompanied by their robot servant Jasmine (Brittany Burch). View Full Caption Claire Demos/Gift Theatre

CHICAGO — A new play debuting Friday at the Gift Theatre, 4802 N. Milwaukee Ave., takes viewers on a deeply personal adventure through time and space.

"Pilgrims" traces the journey of two travelers making their escape from a dystopian future Earth, fixing a sci-fi lens on the theater's 2017 trend toward smaller-cast productions. Like "Unseen," which just wrapped up its run at Gift Theatre, "Pilgrims" uses just three actors to plum the emotional depths of its characters.

It follows an unnamed soldier (Ed Flynn) and a teenage girl (Janelle Villas) trapped together on a spaceship, struggling to piece together their pasts as they prepare for new lives on a colonized planet. A robot servant named Jasmine (Brittany Burch) is along for the ride as well.

The tiny setting in an immense future world creates an "epic intimacy" that unearths the kinds of themes rarely found in other kinds of fiction, according to Gift artistic director Michael Patrick Thornton, who co-directed the play.

"Science fiction as a genre always provides a really unique way of bringing things to the table that we're not usually willing to talk about in our own lives," Thornton said. Playwright Claire Kiechel "is using this other world to ask some really interesting questions about trauma, and our identity as colonists."

"Pilgrims" debuts this Friday and runs until July 30. It will show at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 3:30 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays, and 2:30 p.m. Sundays.

Tickets start at $30 and can be bought online.

"Pilgrims" follows an unnamed soldier (Ed Flynn) and a teenage girl (Janelle Villas) on a spaceship as they make for a colonized planet, accompanied by their robot servant Jasmine (Brittany Burch). [Claire Demos/Gift Theatre]