Silk Road Theatre Project

History, in the grand scheme, can sometimes get a bit dry.  Sometimes it becomes about statistics, mere numbers.  With the history of atrocities, sometimes those numbers bear great resonance–memory, controversy even–and on the other hand, sometimes it is difficult to relate the numbers to the people involved.

The Al Kasida Staged Reading Series gives us the opportunity to explore more plays than we can produce in a season.  More plays means more ideas, and more communities, and more histories.

At any given moment, the theatre is working on many projects that are not yet near the stage.   One of these upcoming projects in Christopher Chen’s play Into the Numbers, which will join the ranks of the Al Kasida readings on December 6 and 7.  This play enters a conversation on a specific point of history, the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, through its main character: the author Iris Chang, whose book The Rape of Nanking brought this incident to mainstream U.S. attention.  Yet the play also enters Iris’ own mental space, bringing its audience into a world of attention to atrocities, a world where personal depression and world sadness meet and unravel.  It is a play precisely ABOUT talking about and living with history.

This week many blog posts are being written about what we’re thankful for.  I’m thankful for plays that encourage and promote difficult and necessary conversations.  Here’s a toast to courage.

As a Literary Manager, I write many letters that go something like this “Thanks for your interest in Silk Road Theatre Project.  Your play, XXXXX, doesn’t fit our current programming, but we appreciate you sharing your work.”  The letters are longer, of course, and hopefully less generic, but at root the conversation about literary management and season planning always has to do with a given theatre’s mission and aesthetic and audience.

The conversations we have at SRTP are mostly conversations about diaspora–about how culture translates from one place to another, or how people and ideas translate from one culture to another. 

This week, a playwright who received one of my letters wrote back, asking me if I would be willing to recommend some Chicago plays to him, for theatres in Korea.  To translate, into Korean.  The resulting exchange of emails involved questions of what is “too American” to translate–or what is already “too Korean” to be interesting as an American play.

So, I throw it out to you, our blog readers: what IS a “Chicago” play?  What’s an “American” play?  What makes a play specific to our time and place?  And, conversely, what conversations do you want to hear, that you aren’t hearing?  Or aren’t hearing enough of?

I recently heard a playwright of Italian descent describing his cultural heritage in terms of the U.S. discourse about race.  It reminds me that we all exist within the frames of history and of appearance, of inheritance and of choice.  What we claim or ignore, what we seek out in our own histories or appreciate in others’, all fits into this bigger picture.

To honor the big picture, here are two more stories of cross-cultural marriages, sent to us in response to our Yohen conversation:

“I am a Jewish American.  My husband is Welsh and from a Christian-but-not-especially family.  Although there have been some moments of confusion caused by our different backgrounds, like when my then-boyfriend told me on the phone about his favorite jumper and I spent all day imagining him in a dress instead of a sweater, or when we had to explain to my grandmother-in-law what a menorah is, overall it has worked to our advantage.  Our families share NO holidays in common, so there is never an argument about where to go for any of them.  And we think our son will have little trouble distinguishing himself on college applications if he speaks both Welsh and Hebrew.  In general, our family enjoys all of our various cultural foibles.  And in the end, while my husband and I may have originally been attracted by our similarities, it is our differences that have kept us interested.”
-Jemma Levy, wife of Steve Smith

“My grandmother is German and met my grandfather, a US serviceman, right after WWII when he was based in Bremen.  They have a great story – including some interesting things I recently found out regarding her citizenship.  And I have a great classic-looking photo of them embracing on the streets of Bremen….her in total 40s look and him in his uniform….”
-LaRonika Thomas

Thank you, Jemma and LaRonika, for sharing the stories of your families!

Down the street from the Silk Road offices, crews are still taking down the tents in Grant Park.

Regardless of who you voted for on Tuesday, you were part of an historic moment.  Not only did we vote in record numbers, we turned out to share the results in record numbers.  How can I help but share some photos of downtown Chicago?

None of the photos can do justice, though, to our cross-cultural blog topic.  Yet they give some idea of what it feels like to be in a large crowd of people thinking, is this a United Colors of Benetton ad?  No, it’s just Chicago.  Integrated.

I lost track of the combinations of age and color and gender and style around me walking the streets that night.  At some point, it stopped mattering.  But I did overhear a woman in a herringbone coat yelling excitedly into her iPhone, “And there were two lesbians standing in front of me, and in front of them, two Muslims!”

When I told my father how exciting and overwhelming it was to be in city in love with its moment, he told me about another moment that he will now think of as linked to this week: he was in the U.S. Senate observers’ gallery in 1957 at roughly 3am when Strom Thurmond sat down after his 24-hour-and-18-minute filibuster.  As soon as he sat down, they voted to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

And I think, oh right, that takes us right back to the idea of why we do theatre.  Because it’s one thing to look at the big picture, but somehow even more satisfying to hear the individual stories of how humans intersect with each other in time.

Got a story of the week, or of the past to share?