Silk Road Theatre Project

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)

SRTP singled out  in Richard Christiansen’s Chicago Tribune Magazine essay “Where do we go from here?”.

“As recently as 10 years ago, for example, who would have thought that … that the Loop’s liveliest new arts group would be the Silk Road Theatre, a troupe dedicated to showcasing playwrights of Asian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean background and operating out of the basement in The Chicago Temple…”

Read the rest of the article here. 

CHICAGO:  A new subscription-based program, designed to highlight the non-white theatre offerings in Chicago, seeks to address recent questions about the Illinoistheatre capital’s image as too predominantly white. Silk Road Theatre Project, the League of Chicago Theatres, Remy Bumppo Theatre Company, Congo Square Theatre Company and Teatro Vista banded together to create a new $98 subscription package, “Looks Like Chicago,”which would give audiences a chance to see one ethnic-specific work from each of the four local companies.

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 Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune –  BEST OF THEATRE 2007 - “All of Chicago a world-class stage”

A risky, rambunctious, acerbic and highly intelligent piece of new writing, this omnicultural take on the troubled Shakespearean classic introduced us to the work of Shishir Kurup. And Stuart Cardin’s lively, punky, premiere production was a great leap forward for Silk Road and a perfect match for such an insouciant script.

 Hedy Weiss, Chicago Tribune, “A bite of the apple, and more”

Silk Road Theatre’s exuberant Bollywoodized production of “Merchant on Venice,” Shishir Kurup’s contemporary take on Shakespeare, with Los Angeles‘ diverse Indian community in the spotlight. 

Time Out Chicago Theater staff, Time Out Chicago, “Ten Most Wanted: We pick the year’s best” 

In transferring Shakespeare’s Merchant to present-day SoCal, playwright Shishir Kurup gave the Bard a dash of hip-hop flavor and Bollywood flair, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world. Shifting Shakespeare’s Christian-Jew conflict to Hindus and Muslims, Kurup managed to comment on everyday religious discord and the challenge of reconciling traditional values with modern America. Stuart Carden’s production assembled a bevy of too-rarely-seen nonwhite actors, led by fiery Anish Jethmalani as a Shylock tough enough to rival Mike Nussbaum’s.

Venus Zarris, PerformInk, “Emotional Vocabulary Lessons”

Silk Road Theatre Project’s Merchant On Venice took another Shakespearian standard and transformed it into an amusing spectacle of cultural intersections. It was a polemic on theological and ethnic collisions that illuminated the overlooked Hindu-Muslim American communities, thereby emancipating the general perceptions of our all too homogenized body politic.