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

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