Silk Road Theatre Project

For the last several Fridays I have been engaging in an activity known around Silk Road as “Clean the Theatre Day.”  The purpose of the activity is exactly as its name suggests – cleaning up the theatre, getting things organized, finding permanent homes for things that have piled up in the corners.  In the case of this particular round of cleaning, the impetus was to finally sort and distribute all the Yohen props that were brought back on the moving truck from Naperville in the middle of the night, and exhaustedly piled in front of the lighting cabinet.  I have a sneaky suspicion that the lighting designer for Pangs of the Messiah is going to want to get in there in the near future, and so, cleaning.

The thing that makes Clean the Theatre Day tolerable (beyond just playing my favorite tunes over the house speakers) is going back through all the odd assorted things we have and remembering the odd assorted circumstances under which we acquired them.  This was particularly fun yesterday, as I had our new Prop Master, Jesse, going through stock for the first time.  There is something priceless about a stranger to the company holding up, say, four martini shakers and saying, “like to make drinks around here?”  And me getting to smile thinking about the fact that we have four of them because we had trouble finding one that the actor could get the lid off of during the scene.  Other things I found that made my day include:

- The “contaminated photo” retrieval tupperware used by the Bomb Squad in 10 Acrobats

- A scrap of red fabric that was part of the million yards of red fabric draped through the rafters during Caravaggio (mostly remembered because part of it kept falling down…)

- The leather studded bracelet worn by Noori in the punk rock scene at the end of Merchant on Venice

- The rice and bean pot from Durango, still slightly crusty

- And, most of all, Noor’s pink plastic personal electronic device from Our Enemies (definitely made better by the fact that it was in a box with computer parts and cell phones… electronics, right?)

The other thing that cleaning the theater has accomplished is a certain amount of equipment maintenance.  As Nick Keenan laid out a few weeks ago in his blog, “only a handful of the dozes of storefront booths… have been laid out intelligently and cleaned in the last five years.”  It’s true… but not here!  I’m quite proud of the fact that I get around to it at least once a year and this time I’ve got my returning stage manager, Michelle, coming in to offer her take on what would make things more comfortable.  Beyond the booth, especially backstage where we’ve had some water leaking problems, I’ve gotten fresh tarps up, the floor mopped, and had talks with building maintenance about places where I would like the concrete patched or the paint touched up (we are very lucky to have building maintenance). 

All together, it looks like we’re going to hit the start of our 2009 season in – at the very least – a clean and tidy place.  Hopefully the new year will bring less “now where did I put that…”

Pangs of the Messiah takes us on a journey to the most fought after piece of real estate in the world, The Holy Land. Israel/Palestine is the birth place of three of the world’s largest religions, the fertile crescent of our past, the stage of many historic and religious events and the current setting to violent unrelenting struggles and blood shed. It is also filled with uncertainty for two groups of people who both lay legitimate claim to this war torn land.

This is the scenic backdrop of our story. In Pangs of the Messiah we have a family. The Berger family could be your typical Orthodox-Jewish family living on a settlement in Judea (the west bank of Israel).The father is a Rabbi, his family and community look to him for guidance and wisdom, the mother is a teacher and leader in the community as well. Like other families around them, the Bergers must make difficult decisions in order to protect what is important to them. In Israel the most important thing to everyone is land. But unlike other families, the Bergers are not willing to compromise their beliefs even if it means standing up and fighting to the bitter end.

Although Motti Lerner’s play is set in the future (2012), Silk Road could not be producing it at a more topical time. In light of the current situation in Gaza, the need for peace and a secure future for Jews and Arabs alike have shown pressing urgency.  In the many attempts to foster a peace agreement in the Middle East, compromise has been considered a necessary obligation. This compromise usually comes in the form of land concessions. For Israel to survive as the Jewish homeland, it believes it must continue to be an independent nation. Therefore the most probable answer to the conflict has been a two state solution.  Two nations, a Jewish state (Israel) and an Arab state (Palestine) co-existing within historic Palestine. To create this solution, some Israeli occupied land must be given back to the Palestinians. We recently witnessed such actions by the Israeli government in 2005 when Israel “withdrew” from Gaza (which it had occupied since the 1967 war) and closed several Jewish settlements in this “peace process”. What happens to the settlers who have built their lives on this occupied land? Do they give it up in the name of peace, or do they fight for their homes? This is the question our Berger family must answer.

Happy New Year!  Welcome to Silk Road Theatre Project’s 2009 season, although I must confess, the concept of season is one I have long struggled with.  How to define a season, curate a season, market a season. Forever pondering such questions as: Why do we even need a season?  What would we program if not a season?  What, after all, is a season?  There must be alternatives to the season?  But alas, from what I’ve discerned, the season is more a friend than a foe, and Silk Road’s about more than just one show (yes, I’m a poet!).

Early on we opted for the calendar year season as opposed to the traditional September – May theatre season.  Later, we developed the notion of “rolling” season, always comprised of three consecutive plays, enabling us to announce a new “third” play at the closing of each “first” play.  In many respects I adore the rolling season.  It defies established timeframes and renders fluid our notions of beginning, middle, and end.   It offers a dynamic that has a progressive, evolving feel to it. Not contained or boxed in, never winding down, or kicking off, or midway through, but flowing, changing, and in flux.   The rolling season does, however, become difficult to curate, as season, in my opinion, connotes a kind of poetry, a rhyme and a reason.  Plays in a given season ought to “speak” to one another, and whether the connective tissue be thematic or genre based or geographic or cultural, said dialogue is perhaps best served by more finite structure.  So I’m inclined to say we’re somewhere between a “regular” season and a rolling season, and the jury’s still out as to whether we’ll “settle” for one or the other.  The good news is that we make it really easy to become a Silk Road Theatre Project subscriber, as you can jump on-board at any time and never miss a season’s show!  We hope you’ll do just that.

So what’s on our stage next?  The Midwest premiere of Motti Lerner’s Pangs of the Messiah (March 19 – May 10, 2009).  Motti is one of Israel’s most celebrated and beloved playwrights, and against the backdrop of the situation in Gaza, this controversial Israeli play is more timely and relevant and urgent than ever.   Whatever your politics and whatever your background, pro-Israel, anti-Israel, indifferent towards Israel, uncertain about the Middle East, this powerful and compelling drama about a family of religious Jewish settlers living in the West Bank, amidst an “outbreak” of peace, promises to rivet and surprise and to challenge.  Oh, does it challenge.  Upon first reading Pangs of the Messiah, I was convinced that I had found a play that Silk Road owes, not only to our treasured audience, but to all of Chicago.   And I guarantee you that within the pantheon of Israel/Palestine related headlines and images, this is a story you will not hear anywhere else.