Silk Road Theatre Project

Bringing Gilgamesh to its second incarnation at the MCA reminded me a bit of my San Francisco Mime Troupe days.  Those too were shows that has to be deconstructed and packed in a truck.  (Or, in this case, a Chevy Malibu or Honda Accord.)  But unlike political satires put up in Delores Park, Gilgamesh now has theatrical lighting (thanks to Sarah Hughey).  Like SFMT, we have music.  In fact, Rob Steel and ensemble’s symphony of hand-held instruments rings even more clearly.  Still though, we had the challenge of adjusting to a new space, with completely different acoustics and sightlines and exits.  We’d spent the second week of October asking the actors to BE LOUDER.  Suddenly, in the MCA theatre, the beauty of quiet revealed itself once more, and Komunyakaa’s poetry bloomed.

One of the things that theatre and poetry have in common* is the distillation of complicated ideas into crystalline images.  Being an ancient epic, the tale of Gilgamesh is rife with epic symbols: the forest of the gods, the snake that sheds its skin, the life-giving plant…

Komunyakaa’s body of work traffics fearlessly in these touchstones, creating and re-creating his own versions into a fresh vocabulary.  Gilgamesh’s mother questions his humanity with “When is the last time/ you gave your mother flowers?”  And when his friend dies, our hero/anti-hero repeats simply “and I sit here and I sit here and I sit here” … until “a maggot drops from Enkidu’s nose.”  In both this piece and his others, the poet paints the ugly beautiful and the beautiful with its ugliness.

From “Poetics”:

This Saturday, November 1, Silk Roaders will gather for the second presentation of Gilgamesh, the ancient epic adapted by poet Yusef Komunyakaa and dramaturg Chad Gracia. This time we’re at the Museum of Contemporary Art, a beautiful space that prompted the “wow! A real theatre!” comment more than once from the cast as they filtered in for the brush up rehearsal.

To get you in the mood for attending, here are a few pictures from Sunday! Top: Procession into the theatre, Middle: Gilgamesh talks to the Scorpion People, Bottom: the Council of Elders

If you’ve been reading around the media of Silk Road and our friend organizations, you may have heard something about Middle East America (MEA): A National New Plays Initiative.

Silk Road, with Golden Thread Productions in San Francisco and the Lark Play Development Center in New York, formed this initiative to encourage and support new work by American writers of Middle Eastern backgrounds.  As Lark Producing Director John Clinton Eisner puts it, “Our nation’s energy and innovation has often sprung from immigrant’s stories and global perspectives, and this commission represents a new path for cultural institutions learning to collaborate on building new repertoire that more accurately mirrors and celebrates America’s ever-evolving cultural landscape.”

MEA’s first Middle East America Distinguished Playwright Award goes to Adriana Sevan, who was recently in Chicago performing her sold-out solo piece Taking Flight at the Goodman Theatre’s Latino Festival (Sevan’s ancestry is Armenian, Dominican, and Basque).  MEA is also honoring both Leila Buck and Sinan Unel with the 2008 Middle East America Special Jury Prize.  The first of its kind, this prize provides a $10,000 commission for Sevan to write a new play, intensive developmental support from the Lark, possible productions at Golden Thread and Silk Road, and travel funds to be present at all stages of the process.

I had the pleasure of reading these plays as part of the stage-one committee—the finalists were chosen based on our recommendations, and then final decisions made by the heads of the three participating theatres.  We saw some familiar names, certainly, but also many new writers—a testament to the variety and quality of voices out there writing, ready to be heard.

Jamil describes Sevan’s ambitious proposal: “This exciting first commission promises to enrich the canon of American theatre and our understanding of Middle Eastern Americans. Adriana plans to conduct research exploring themes of family, atrocity, migration, and memory, including the untold stories of the Turkish Schindlers who helped Armenians survive their Ottoman tormentors. The play is inspired by Adriana’s grandparents who survived the Armenian genocide before fleeing to the shores of New England.”

For more information on the Middle East America: A New Plays Initiative: www.middleeastamerica.org.

(The Lark, meanwhile, has recently received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in response to Mellon’s “three-year study into the particular problems new plays encounter.”  According to the New York Times, “Michael Robertson, the managing director of Lark, said the group planned to use its half-million dollars to ensure that three new plays are each staged at four different theaters around the country within 18 months. The program is a way to combat what he calls world premiere-itis.”  This dedication is one of many recent moves to foster collaborations between theatres for play development and production (rather than theatres competing for world-premiere status, which often traps plays in the development loop with no productions in sight).
(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/theater/21mell.html?ei=5070)

Photo by Guido Alvarez.

Another excellent source for discussions about race: Dawn Turner Trice’s newsblog for the Chicago Tribune.  As she puts it, “We have a moment in history to have a national discussion about race. We should seize it and try to mine it for what it’s worth.”

Siblings. Photo by Steve Gatto.

p.s. In this vein, more notes on 1986:

1986 Academy Award for Best Picture: Out of Africa

(The movie’s a classic, of course–and so is the book by Isak Dinesen.  Talk about complicated colonial relations!)

1986 Song of the Year “We are the World” (Different?  Not so different?  Where do good intentions work, and where do they go awry?)

From 1896, in the Library of Congress. Photo by Bob Bobster.

On Saturday, Silk Road will present Gilgamesh, the “world’s oldest story,” in a recent version by Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa and dramaturg Chad Gracia, at the Oriental Institute in partnership with the Chicago Humanities Festival and the Poetry Foundation.  Among its treasures, the Oriental Institute houses a mummified body roughly the age of the story, Mesopotamian prayer statues, and clay tablets with cuneiform writing that may depict Gilgamesh standing on the head of the vanquished monster Humbaba.

For those who don’t remember or never encountered this epic in their early education, it’s the tale of a king of Uruk (a man who actually did live nearly 4000 years ago), who according to legend was a cruel and corrupt king, until the gods created a man to balance him.  They battle, they become friends.  They take on monsters.  The friend dies.  Gilgamesh, having just learned how to care about another person, undertakes a wild quest to find the man who survived the great flood, who might share with him the secret of immortality.  Frightening creatures block his journey (Komunyakaa’s scorpion people rehearse in the photo, below).

Yet Gilgamesh does find the immortal plant.  And then, suddenly, after all the trouble, he puts it down for just a moment, and a snake comes along and eats it.

At the first rehearsal of this staged reading, the cast asked: what’s the message for us today?

The question of Gilgamesh is quite simple: We must go on epic impossible quests.  Through them, we learn humility, we learn to care for others, and we learn, and relearn, and teach one another how to live in the world as humans, with other humans.

More information about the reading, and about Komunyakaa’s remarkable work, here:

http://poetryfoundation.org/programs/events.html

Meanwhile, at the theater, everyone was busy preparing for the afternoon performance of Yohen. Amanda, our intern-turned-house-manager, put up the welcome signs and tidied up the lobby. In the box office, Amber and Ashley stuffed envelopes of tickets and coupons for guests who would be joining us at the performance. Michelle, the stage manager, flipped through the light cues and turned on all the technical equipment, while Sara, her faithful assistant, set props in Sumi’s kitchen.

It takes about 80 minutes of prep to get a performance of Yohen off the ground. Some shows, such as this spring’s Our Enemies, have taken as long as 2 or 2.5 hours to get set up. The stage manager is the hub of it all, answering questions and helping everyone get organized – including taking calls from anyone who is running late and from the understudies checking in to see if they are needed to go on.

In this picture, Page, the wardrobe supervisor, applies a “bruise” make up effect to actor Ernest Perry. Page is also responsible for Sumi’s “roots showing” hairdo, and all the laundry and ironing that keep the cast looking great!

Even the stage managers need fresh air some times! From left to right – Allie, production manager, Michelle, stage manager, and Sara, assistant stage manager, hanging out in Millennium park between the matinée and evening shows last Saturday.

One lovely answer to our call for blending of cultures photos:

From Carolyn Briones:

“…myself, husband, and our son as a baby. I really love this picture, and ultimately for this project, I feel this photo reflects the beautiful result of two cultures coming together.”

Thanks, Carolyn!