Silk Road Theatre Project

By Rebecca A. Barrett, Lighting Designer

Today I am drafting the light plot. Some people prefer to draft on the computer, I prefer to draft by hand – at least for the rough plot. There’s something satisfying about the feel of the pencil on paper that resonates with me, awakening images and drawing me to the settlements of Israel. So, as I am gazing out of my window at the city skyline in this predawn light I am also in Samaria, golden motes of sunlight spilling onto the dining room table of the Berger family. Their world is so drastically different from mine, with its guns and bombings and yet so heartbreakingly the same. My heart aches for those people.

There are some images that have been inspirational to the lighting design of Pangs. These images by other talented artists and photographers have helped draw me into the world of this play.

The first images represent where this play begins: a Mediterranean homestead, the Israeli Promised Land.

As the play progresses, we will be using flashlights and other moving light sources to underscore the growing tension and unease. In so much of the video research I have seen, there is someone caught in a spotlight and in the background, truck headlights scan the streets and flashlights illuminate the dark with their narrow beams.

Throughout the play we will highlight these characters in their everyday lives as they struggle to cling to the land they love and protect each other from harm.

And in the last scene…

Well, I don’t want to give away the end. You’ll just have to come see for yourself. Anyways, I should get back to drafting…

Check out playwright Motti Lerner’s interview about PANGS OF THE MESSIAH on Chicago Public Radio.  Actors Bernie Beck and Susan Adler are featured as well.  

http://audio.wbez.org/wv/2009/02/wv_20090220a.mp3

For those of you feeling that you need more information to fully understand Pangs of the Messiah, please consult this glossary, prepared by dramaturg Kefah Crowley.  Please note that this is not an exhaustive list, but a sampling of some terms you will hear during the show.

Al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock- a mosque and a shrine respectively, considered the 3^rd holiest site in the Islamic world, from where the Prophet Mohamed is believed to have ascended to heaven. Al Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock are located in Jerusalem’s Old City, on the site revered by Jews as the Temple Mount.

Goy- The Hebrew term for a Gentile or a non-Jew.

Headscarves- Married Orthodox women are required to cover their heads. Many married Orthodox women wear headscarves, some wear wigs.

Jewish Diaspora- The communities of Jews outside the historic Land of Israel, traditionally associated with the expulsion and dispersal of Jews to other countries following the destruction of the First and Second Temples.   

Kibbutz – a communal, typically rural Jewish settlement in Israel associated with strong socialist, egalitarian, and Zionist principles.

Knesset – (Hebrew word for “assembly”), the Knesset is the Israeli parliament

Mukhtar - (Arabic word for “chosen”), refers to the head of an Arab town or village selected by means of consensus.

Pangs of the Messiah- In Hebrew, “Chevlai shel Mashiach,” or “birth pains,” refers to the future in which there will be seven years of tribulation that lead to the coming of the Messiah. This era will be known as Chevlai shel Mashiach.

Shomron – (Hebrew word for “Samaria”) - Biblical term used to describe the territory known as the northern West Bank.

Talit – a Jewish prayer shawl worn while reciting morning prayers.  It is also worn for Sabbath prayers in the synagogue and on holidays.

Tefillin – also called phylacteries, a pair of black leather boxes containing scrolls of parchment inscribed with bible verses.

Temple Mount- The Torah records that it was at this site in Jerusalem that God chose to rest his Divine Presence.  The two great Jewish Temples, built by King David and King Solomon and destroyed by the Babylonians and the Romans respectively, were built on this site. According to Jewish tradition when the Messiah comes, he will bring with him the third and final Temple, which will rest on the Temple Mount.

Yesha Council- Yesha is the Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria and Gaza (Yehuda, Shomron, Aza), also referred to as “the territories.” The Yesha Council was founded in the late 1970s as the successor to Gush Emunim, the organization that led the settling of Jews in the territories captured in the Six-Day War of June 1967. The goal of the Yesha Council is to strengthen and increase the Jewish presence in the occupied territories by continuing to build settlements.

Zionism- A return to Zion (Jerusalem). Zionism is a political and religious movement that seeks the return of Jews to their biblical (historical) homeland in Palestine. Old Zionism was premised on the belief that the Messiah would lead Jews back to their home. New Zionism (19^th century Zionism) shifted the responsibility for the return from the Messiah to the Jewish people themselves.

by Kurt Sharp, set designer

I burst into tears at the first read through of ‘Pangs of the Messiah’ the other night. I think the reason was that hearing the actors honestly and simply put forth the arguments of the play made me very angry, the way that a great tragedy can.  I remember seeing a production of Romeo and Juliet once and feeling a sense of dread at what I could tell was going to happen and sadness at the waste of it all.  But instead of merely ending a feud between families in Renaissance Italy, the events of ‘Pangs’ could happen in Israel tomorrow and directly affect us here in Chicago, with results that are terrifying.

At the reading I presented the model of the setting. There is much that is specific to this play about the West Bank settlements, so visual research provided a language of textures and materials that would reinforce our sense of place. Silk Road’s performance space is intimate and its rafters suggest the exposed construction of a great room ceiling. This particular living room is not only a rabbi’s home, but also a command center for a political and religious movement. Its’ jumble of worn furniture reflects this family’s changing goals and sacrifices. It seems a little chaotic at this time of crisis. Set in the near future, the show utilizes projections and voiceovers during scene transitions to emphasize the constant exposure to violent struggle, and the escalation of political and religious tensions.

It was wonderful to meet the playwright and hear him speak about the play. Motti Lerner has a character in ‘Pangs’ express concern that the school children in the settlement may be being traumatized by their use as a roadblock to stop soldiers– that saving the settlement by such means might sacrifice the sanity of the people who will inherit it.  It hit me during the read-through that idea drives the whole play. Each of the family members we meet is already damaged in some way. And what about the grandchildren we never meet?  If they have lost their humanity, what will it matter if the Messiah comes?

The set model

On Sunday playwright  Motti Lerner landed at O’Hare airport after 8  hours of flights and layovers from Tel Aviv.  His itinerary for the week he’ll be spending as our guest in Chicago is packed!  There are appearances on WTTW’s “Arts Across Illinois” and Chicago Public Radio’s “Worldview,” he’ll speak with JUF News and Chicago Jewish News, and even appear on an episode of Silk Road’s own CAN-TV series “Silk Road Sojourns.”  But it’s not all about work for our celebrity.  He mentioned to me over cups of Starbucks the other morning that he also hopes to visit a friend who lives in Naperville that he hasn’t seen in 40 years!

The following pictures are from first rehearsal of Mr. Lerner’s play Pangs of the Messiah, which will preview starting March 19 and open March 28.  The shots are paired with quotes from the Meet the Playwright event that was held at the Silk Road office on Tuesday February 3.

David Chack and Motti Lerner

About the topic of the play:

“The set designer (Kurt Sharp)… said last night that a good play is about the worst day in a person’s life.”

“What is the most dangerous political phenomenon that is taking place in Israel?  And this (question) was in 1985…”

About Messianic beliefs:

“It (the play) was not written from hatred.  It was written from fear.”

I think it is very evident in the play that I respect those people very much, but I oppose them totally.”

“This is a messianic movement.  They think there is a possibility to change God’s plans – to accelerate the coming of the messiah.”

“If you believe you can accelerate the coming of the messiah that’s fine, but don’t impose those ideas on the state… we have to negotiate with people, not angels.

Jamil Khoury and Jennifer Green

About being a writer:

“I do not write about remembering events.  I do not write about contemplating events.  I write about events that are present.”

Mr. Lerner described rehearsal of new plays in Israel as being an 8-week process.  “We all agree that the first four weeks we do changes,” he said.

“You can’t write a play if you judge the characters… be very intimate, feel them, love them… to feel that you are in their shoes.  On the other hand, you have to write from critisism… look at them from a distance and know who they are.”

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.

We recently announced a new and unusual project here at Silk Road–a collaboration with Adler Planetarium, and AT Adler Planetarium–a brand new play only recently titled Dragon/Sky.

Here’s a little window on the making of a new play:

In this case, Adler and SRTP enjoyed long conversations over the course of many months about what a collaboration might be for a live theatre piece in Adler’s newly renovated theatre.  To join the Chicago-wide Year of China (2009), the conversation focused into a play on Chinese astronomy.  SRTP then commissioned Elizabeth Wong, a playwright also under commission for The DNA Trail, and whose play China Doll has received a staged reading at SRTP, to write a new play.

Since last spring, Elizabeth and I have corresponded and shared research on star legends and astronomical history via email between Chicago and her home base in California.  When she came to Chicago in July she visited the Planetarium.  Eventually, an inspiration about video games emerged.  Then came the title: Dragon/Sky. The first time the designers met, we didn’t even have a script.  Such is the life of the new play.

Now we have the first draft.  This week, Elizabeth and director Tom Arvetis and a workshop cast are spending five days reading and listening and talking and re-writing.  All for a play that won’t happen until the summer.

When it’s warm, come out to the Adler, see a dragon, and think: what a long gestation these play-creatures have.

There is an article taught in college dramaturgy classes that presents and then takes apart the idea that the dramaturg sits behind the director and to the side.

In the rehearsal for the reading of Into the Numbers I’ve been sitting behind director Joanie Schultz and playwright Christopher Chen, which is a delightful place to sit.  Not only do I get to see the writer’s reactions to his own play, but I get to watch the two passing notes.

Passing notes, a practice so denigrated in junior high, is quite effective in the context of a rehearsal, where silence respects the actors working through scenes, but instant communication is necessary to to tweak and shape that work.

Meanwhile, behind me sits Stephen Ptacek, our sound consultant, typing notes into his laptop.  A sound consultant is an unusual beast to have in a rehearsal process for a staged reading–but because Christopher Chen takes his audience into a disintegrating world, discussing the actual theatrical means of representing disintegration is key in understanding how to make the play work.

Now our work is a series of questions, deconstructing a play that deconstructs the fictional internal world of an author who tracked down the details of history long buried in dusty archives.

We are lucky and grateful to have had a visit from Monica Eng, a Tribune reporter who wrote about and crossed paths with Iris Chang, and Paula Kamen, the author of Finding Iris Chang: Friendship, Ambition, and the Loss of an Extraordinary Mind, who were both kind enough to share their personal and professional knowledge.   If you are intrigued about Iris Chang and Nanking, you can find Paula’s book in paperback this month.  And the film Nanking is available on DVD.