Silk Road Theatre Project

Silk Road Theatre Project announces the debut of SouthAsianPlaywrights.Org, a dynamic new website created to showcase and promote American and Canadian playwrights of South Asian descent. SouthAsianPlaywrights.Org aims to create greater visibility for the twenty five playwrights currently featured on the site and promote each playwright’s work to theatre companies, cultural organizations, and academic institutions, as well as to artistic directors, producers, directors, literary managers, editors, publishers, and all other interested parties.  The belief is that enhanced exposure will result in an increase in the number of productions these talented playwrights receive.

Featuring at launch: Sarovar Banka, Sujata G. Bhatt, Sudipta Bhawmik, Anita Chandwaney, Naveen Bahar Choudhury, Deen, Snehal Desai, Taniya Hossain, Mrinalini Kamath, Aditi Brennan Kapil, Ravi Kapoor, Shishir Kurup, Rohina Malik, Rehana Mirza, Shyamala Morti, Anuvab Pal, Lina Patel, Shailja Patel, Shane Sakhrani, Nandita Shenoy, Aamera Siddiqui, Ranbir Sidhu, Meera Simhan, Sujay Sood, and Brenden Varma.

Friend of SRTP Neilesh Bose launches his new book “Beyond Bollywood and Broadway: Plays from South Asian Diaspora” at a free Conference on South Asian diasporic theatre on August 10th and 11th at the CUNY Graduate Center NY, NY featuring many South Asian playwrights. Details.

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…”

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.

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)

It never hurts to ask, right? At least that was the theory when we started asking around for money to replace our ugly red folding chairs with spiffy new ones. Read the rest of this entry »