Silk Road Theatre Project

Interviewer: And so now, back to… the number of Tutsis killed by the Hutus in Rwanda.

Iris Chang: Around 800,000

Interviewer: The number of Huguenots killed in the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.

Iris Chang: Around 70,000.

Interviewer: The number of children under 5 that die from Asthma in the United States.

Iris Chang: Around 100.

Interviewer: The price of a package of chicken breasts at Safeway.

Iris Chang: $3.50 for a package of 3.

Despite the irony of the excerpt above the tragic death of author Iris Chang, explored in Christopher Chen’s play “Into the Numbers,” is far from humorous. Last night we began work on the staged reading, which will have public performances later this week. Though the first few moments of rehearsal were filled with smiles and embraces – exclamations of “I haven’t seen you in so long!” and “how did your show go?” – the mood shifted as soon as we began to read.

The play goes inside Iris Chang’s mind in the last days before her death by suicide in 2005. In an article that appeared this week in the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, Chen said of the play, “I made it more of a fantasy than real biography. I kind of go along with the idea that she was trying to wrestle with the unknown, the unthinkable…” That struggle leads Iris into what our sound designer, Stephen Ptacek, described as a “vortex” of her mental illness and the horror of the genocides she had been researching.

As shown in this image the structure of a vortex is bigger at the top – the circumference wider – and narrows over distance to a single point. Ptacek and Jennifer Shin, who is playing Iris in the reading, riffed on the idea that early in Chang’s career, when she was first conducting research for her bestselling book, The Rape of Nanking, the “cycles” between her times of clarity and her times of mental illness (Chang suffered from bipolar disorder) were longer. As the pressure of her job mounted, and the horrors she was discovering grew, she cycled faster and faster, until she was alone at the base of the vortex. Even the structure of the text spirals to a point, leaving the character of Iris spelling “bayoneted them” one letter at a time as the interviewer counts down the minutes to her death.

The team is rounded out by director Joanie Schultz, cast members Yosh Hayashi, Devorah Richards, Erik Kaiko and Brent Barnes, dramaturg Jen Shook, and stage manager Kefah Crowley. Performances are Dec. 6 at 8pm and Dec. 7 at 1pm in the Silk Road space at the Chicago Temple.

History, in the grand scheme, can sometimes get a bit dry.  Sometimes it becomes about statistics, mere numbers.  With the history of atrocities, sometimes those numbers bear great resonance–memory, controversy even–and on the other hand, sometimes it is difficult to relate the numbers to the people involved.

The Al Kasida Staged Reading Series gives us the opportunity to explore more plays than we can produce in a season.  More plays means more ideas, and more communities, and more histories.

At any given moment, the theatre is working on many projects that are not yet near the stage.   One of these upcoming projects in Christopher Chen’s play Into the Numbers, which will join the ranks of the Al Kasida readings on December 6 and 7.  This play enters a conversation on a specific point of history, the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, through its main character: the author Iris Chang, whose book The Rape of Nanking brought this incident to mainstream U.S. attention.  Yet the play also enters Iris’ own mental space, bringing its audience into a world of attention to atrocities, a world where personal depression and world sadness meet and unravel.  It is a play precisely ABOUT talking about and living with history.

This week many blog posts are being written about what we’re thankful for.  I’m thankful for plays that encourage and promote difficult and necessary conversations.  Here’s a toast to courage.

As a Literary Manager, I write many letters that go something like this “Thanks for your interest in Silk Road Theatre Project.  Your play, XXXXX, doesn’t fit our current programming, but we appreciate you sharing your work.”  The letters are longer, of course, and hopefully less generic, but at root the conversation about literary management and season planning always has to do with a given theatre’s mission and aesthetic and audience.

The conversations we have at SRTP are mostly conversations about diaspora–about how culture translates from one place to another, or how people and ideas translate from one culture to another. 

This week, a playwright who received one of my letters wrote back, asking me if I would be willing to recommend some Chicago plays to him, for theatres in Korea.  To translate, into Korean.  The resulting exchange of emails involved questions of what is “too American” to translate–or what is already “too Korean” to be interesting as an American play.

So, I throw it out to you, our blog readers: what IS a “Chicago” play?  What’s an “American” play?  What makes a play specific to our time and place?  And, conversely, what conversations do you want to hear, that you aren’t hearing?  Or aren’t hearing enough of?

I recently heard a playwright of Italian descent describing his cultural heritage in terms of the U.S. discourse about race.  It reminds me that we all exist within the frames of history and of appearance, of inheritance and of choice.  What we claim or ignore, what we seek out in our own histories or appreciate in others’, all fits into this bigger picture.

To honor the big picture, here are two more stories of cross-cultural marriages, sent to us in response to our Yohen conversation:

“I am a Jewish American.  My husband is Welsh and from a Christian-but-not-especially family.  Although there have been some moments of confusion caused by our different backgrounds, like when my then-boyfriend told me on the phone about his favorite jumper and I spent all day imagining him in a dress instead of a sweater, or when we had to explain to my grandmother-in-law what a menorah is, overall it has worked to our advantage.  Our families share NO holidays in common, so there is never an argument about where to go for any of them.  And we think our son will have little trouble distinguishing himself on college applications if he speaks both Welsh and Hebrew.  In general, our family enjoys all of our various cultural foibles.  And in the end, while my husband and I may have originally been attracted by our similarities, it is our differences that have kept us interested.”
-Jemma Levy, wife of Steve Smith

“My grandmother is German and met my grandfather, a US serviceman, right after WWII when he was based in Bremen.  They have a great story – including some interesting things I recently found out regarding her citizenship.  And I have a great classic-looking photo of them embracing on the streets of Bremen….her in total 40s look and him in his uniform….”
-LaRonika Thomas

Thank you, Jemma and LaRonika, for sharing the stories of your families!

Down the street from the Silk Road offices, crews are still taking down the tents in Grant Park.

Regardless of who you voted for on Tuesday, you were part of an historic moment.  Not only did we vote in record numbers, we turned out to share the results in record numbers.  How can I help but share some photos of downtown Chicago?

None of the photos can do justice, though, to our cross-cultural blog topic.  Yet they give some idea of what it feels like to be in a large crowd of people thinking, is this a United Colors of Benetton ad?  No, it’s just Chicago.  Integrated.

I lost track of the combinations of age and color and gender and style around me walking the streets that night.  At some point, it stopped mattering.  But I did overhear a woman in a herringbone coat yelling excitedly into her iPhone, “And there were two lesbians standing in front of me, and in front of them, two Muslims!”

When I told my father how exciting and overwhelming it was to be in city in love with its moment, he told me about another moment that he will now think of as linked to this week: he was in the U.S. Senate observers’ gallery in 1957 at roughly 3am when Strom Thurmond sat down after his 24-hour-and-18-minute filibuster.  As soon as he sat down, they voted to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

And I think, oh right, that takes us right back to the idea of why we do theatre.  Because it’s one thing to look at the big picture, but somehow even more satisfying to hear the individual stories of how humans intersect with each other in time.

Got a story of the week, or of the past to share?

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

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)

Photo by Guido Alvarez.

Another excellent source for discussions about race: Dawn Turner Trice’s newsblog for the Chicago Tribune.  As she puts it, “We have a moment in history to have a national discussion about race. We should seize it and try to mine it for what it’s worth.”

Siblings. Photo by Steve Gatto.

p.s. In this vein, more notes on 1986:

1986 Academy Award for Best Picture: Out of Africa

(The movie’s a classic, of course–and so is the book by Isak Dinesen.  Talk about complicated colonial relations!)

1986 Song of the Year “We are the World” (Different?  Not so different?  Where do good intentions work, and where do they go awry?)

From 1896, in the Library of Congress. Photo by Bob Bobster.

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