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.