Silk Road Theatre Project

Love em or hate em, few childhood memories are as strong as those of the family road trip. Sometimes the destination matters, sometimes what you find along the way is more memorable, sometimes who you drive with defines the journey, and sometimes you just take pictures of funny signs.

To celebrate Durango we want you to share road trip stories and especially photos. Post your road trip stories and photos as comments to this post or email them to me. –Lee

We pulled out a bench from furniture stock and put it in the down right corner of the stage. Far up left three rolling office chairs signfied the “car.” Together, the pieces created our theatrical representation of the space between the parking lot and ticket office for the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. But what did that space look like in real life? The cast, crew and director gathered around curiously as I pulled up the internet on the laptop I use in rehearsal and typed “Durango ticket office” into Google.

The best link by far was from someone who had been to the city recently and posted pictures from his or her trip (though in the couple of days it’s taken me to make this blog entry I can’t find the link any more). The City of Durango Web site, and the D&SNGR site (everyone’s got a Web site these days!) were both helpful for pictures of the city as it is now and as it was in its historical past.

Content with what the vast internet had to offer, I journeyed to the SRTP Google Group - a site we created internally to post pictures and share research and production materials in the show creation period. There I found pictures from our company member Lee Keenan’s family trips to the southwest, including this great dinosaur running over the red hills and - of course - the Durango ticket office!

The amazing technology of the World Wide Web was invaluable to the folks in rehearsal that day for helping us grasp the landscape of where our characters had landed. Seeing the images of the Durango region - particularly the candid family snapshots - really put us in a wonderful mental place for visualizing and understanding the world we were creating. And all this with the click of a few quick search buttons!

On March 24 on the stage of the still-running Our Enemies, the actors, designers and technical team for Durango met for the first time. The assembled included playwright Julia Cho and director Carlos Murillo, as well as company members Carol Blanchard (costume design), Rob Steel (sound design), Rebecca Barrett (lighting design), Isaac Sernoffsky (associate producer), and Jen Shook (literary manager). We were joined by guest designers Marianna Csaszar (set design) and Dan Katz (prop design), and a collection of other staff and crew folks. As always with first rehearsal, it was a wonderful experience to finally see everyone face to face.

After a round of introductions and a lot of business and paperwork, we got to the point of the evening - the text. More than a few of us were giggling out loud at Julia’s hillariously tragic story of the secrets and misconnections between an aging father and his teenage sons on a road trip from Mesa, Arizona to Durango, Colorado. For example:

Isaac: Are you telling me this stupid train is in COLORADO?

Boo-Seng: SO?

Isaac: YOU DIDN’T TELL US THAT!

Boo-Seng: I SAID DON’T YELL. Durango is in Colorado, everyone know that.

Isaac: WE didn’t. We didn’t know that we wereembarking on a trip that actually crossed STATE LINES.

Boo-Seng: LINE. State LINE. Arizona, Colorado. Thassit!

The cast that will bring the piece to life on stage this spring includes Joseph Fornonda (Boo-Seng Lee), Erik Kaiko (Jimmy Lee), Dawen Wang (Isaac Lee), Walter Brody (Ned/Jerry) and Austin Campion (Bob/The Red Angel).

Congratulations are in order for Monica Lopez who is featured in the Sun-Times today in a piece by Hedy Weiss called “Roles of a lifetime: 10 ideal casting choices add realism and enthusiasm to Chicago stages”.

4. MONICA LOPEZ

Monica Lopez is wonderfully fiery, funny and self-assured as Noor, the smart, seductive and conflicted young Arab-American novelist at the center of Silk Road Theater Project’s production of “Our Enemies: Scenes of Love and Combat.” The actress easily goes beyond the play’s zesty politics of identity to get to the universal core of her character. For here is a very attractive, sophisticated, independent-minded woman who makes some ridiculous choices when it comes to men. And Lopez knows precisely how to put on a dress, wrap herself in a sheet and deal with the advances of several very different sorts of seducers.

SEE HER: In “Our Enemies,” running through March 30. Tickets: (866) 811-4111.

read the whole article 

The buzz on Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and Combat has been huge. And now the reviews are coming in.

Chicago Tribune’s Chris Jones says, “…if you’re interested in smart new plays, don’t miss this one. It’s the best piece by the hugely talented El Guindi that I’ve seen. And it’s further evidence that Silk Road has real guts…“ 

Check out full text of all the reviews and features  ->

SRTP singled out  in Richard Christiansen’s Chicago Tribune Magazine essay “Where do we go from here?”.

“As recently as 10 years ago, for example, who would have thought that … that the Loop’s liveliest new arts group would be the Silk Road Theatre, a troupe dedicated to showcasing playwrights of Asian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean background and operating out of the basement in The Chicago Temple…”

Read the rest of the article here. 

Check out this wonderful blog post about SRTP written by Adam Thurman, President of Mission Paradox. Click here.

Posted on Time Out Chicago’s Blog in Theater by Kris Vire on February 1st, 2008

Next Theatre and the Silk Road Theatre Project are coming together tomorrow to present a discussion between Arab-American playwrights Yussef El-Guindi (author of Silk Road’s world premiere Our Enemies, opening March 1) and Heather Raffo (the writer-performer of 9 Parts of Desire, coming to the Museum of Contemporary Art in May as a co-production of Next and the MCA).

Moderated by Silk Road’s artistic director Jamil Khoury, the talk is expected to touch on Arab-American representation in U.S. pop culture and “the emergence of a post-9/11 Arab-American cultural movement.” The discussion, starting at 2pm Saturday at Silk Road’s home in the Chicago Temple building, is free to attend, though reservations are recommended: call 312-857-1234, extension 201 to reserve.

The two theaters are also offering a package deal to see both shows for $50. Though less than six years old, Silk Road has proven adept at making smart partnerships with more established theaters—they’re the driving force behind Looks Like Chicago, a multi-theater subscription offer involving the Middle Eastern/South Asian-focused Silk Road, the African-diaspora–centered Congo Square, Latino company Teatro Vista and Eurocentric Remy Bumppo. Of course, the very fact that Silk Road got a permanent home in the Loop in its second year of existence (paid for by their hosts, the Chicago Temple’s First United Methodist Church) speaks to the company’s people skills and business smarts. I hope we see more of the theater community going the team-up route.

CHICAGO:  A new subscription-based program, designed to highlight the non-white theatre offerings in Chicago, seeks to address recent questions about the Illinoistheatre capital’s image as too predominantly white. Silk Road Theatre Project, the League of Chicago Theatres, Remy Bumppo Theatre Company, Congo Square Theatre Company and Teatro Vista banded together to create a new $98 subscription package, “Looks Like Chicago,”which would give audiences a chance to see one ethnic-specific work from each of the four local companies.

Read the rest of this entry »

 Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune -  BEST OF THEATRE 2007 - “All of Chicago a world-class stage”

A risky, rambunctious, acerbic and highly intelligent piece of new writing, this omnicultural take on the troubled Shakespearean classic introduced us to the work of Shishir Kurup. And Stuart Cardin’s lively, punky, premiere production was a great leap forward for Silk Road and a perfect match for such an insouciant script.

 Hedy Weiss, Chicago Tribune, “A bite of the apple, and more”

Silk Road Theatre’s exuberant Bollywoodized production of “Merchant on Venice,” Shishir Kurup’s contemporary take on Shakespeare, with Los Angeles‘ diverse Indian community in the spotlight. 

Time Out Chicago Theater staff, Time Out Chicago, “Ten Most Wanted: We pick the year’s best” 

In transferring Shakespeare’s Merchant to present-day SoCal, playwright Shishir Kurup gave the Bard a dash of hip-hop flavor and Bollywood flair, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world. Shifting Shakespeare’s Christian-Jew conflict to Hindus and Muslims, Kurup managed to comment on everyday religious discord and the challenge of reconciling traditional values with modern America. Stuart Carden’s production assembled a bevy of too-rarely-seen nonwhite actors, led by fiery Anish Jethmalani as a Shylock tough enough to rival Mike Nussbaum’s.

Venus Zarris, PerformInk, “Emotional Vocabulary Lessons”

Silk Road Theatre Project’s Merchant On Venice took another Shakespearian standard and transformed it into an amusing spectacle of cultural intersections. It was a polemic on theological and ethnic collisions that illuminated the overlooked Hindu-Muslim American communities, thereby emancipating the general perceptions of our all too homogenized body politic.