1001 3.5/5 Starring Rebecca Lawrence, Hugo Medina, Anne Stella Directed by Kim Rubenstein
Ali Baba had forty thieves; Scheherazade had a thousand tales; now, we have playwright Jason Grote’s ‘1001’ ‘mdash; a postmodernist, street-rat revamp of Middle Eastern legends.With the aid of a thundering time machine, the fantasy careens from ancient Persia to post-9/11 New York, allegorizing the cyclical trends of war-torn history.
Premiering at Mandel Weiss Forum Studio ‘mdash; in snug quarters with makeshift seats ‘mdash; ‘1001’ is a sweeping magic carpet ride above a whirlwind of costume and character changes. The cogent seven-actor cast swiftly moves from fairytale narrative into the anachronistic, antic cameos of Jorge Luis Borges, Alan Dershowitz, Gustave Flaubert and, yes, Osama bin Laden (a source of diabolical laughter, terrorizing not with weapons of mass destruction but with a high-pitched narration of Vincent Price’s ‘Thriller’). ‘
From the beginning, we are bombarded us with the play’s take-home message: ‘There’s only one story … space comprised of every word that has ever been or ever will be uttered.’
The tongue-in-cheek introduction veils the true moroseness of its thematic undercurrents. Witness to his queen’s adultery, an impish King Shahriyar (the wonderfully pouty Hugo Medina) vows to marry a virgin, then deflower and behead her, in order to absolve himself of a ‘cesspool of iniquity.’
Prefacing the play’s deft abandonment of the time continuum, ‘1001’ adopts ‘Monty Python’ spoonerisms and malapropisms (‘I am genital. Gentile! No, gentle!’) in his bedtime e
scapades. Adding to the absurdity are shadows of hilariously explicit body wiggles and pushups projected against the stark backdrop as the king religiously marinates his kabob.
Archetypal female trickster Scheherazade (masterful Rebecca Lawrence) then condemns her father, the vizier (Daniel Rubiano), for his timid submission to the king. ‘You lack the courage to save our lives and his.’ she rebuffs in holier-than-thou contempt. Scheming her own salvation, Schederazade spins the well-worn tales of ‘Arabian Nights’ into a trap for the king while slapstick duo Zo’euml; Chao and Adam Arian animate the likes of Aladdin and Sinbad on stage. Each story emerges from within the former like a Babushka doll. Scheherazade (literally, ‘liberator of the city’) entices Shahriyar to postpone her beheading with the false promise that she’ll finally complete her fables.
So begins Grote’s meanderings, entering Escher’s warped space of overlapping timeframes and plotlines. We land ultimately in a world of ‘granola bars and air freshener’ at Columbia University, wrapped up in the tottery relationship between liberal Jewish graduate student Alan and his Palestinian girlfriend, Dahna ‘mdash; reincarnations of Shahriyar and Scheherazade, played duly by Medina and Lawrence. As political turmoil escalates, the frays of their relationship grow taut. Regardless of the play’s modern political undertones, director Kim Rubinstein still envisions ‘1001’ as a testament to love.
‘I have a great belief that all politics start from the human heart,’ she said at the after how Q’amp;A. ‘It starts domestically ‘mdash; the way we treat other moment to moment, the way we treat each other day to day. We either treat people coldly as encounters, or we treat things with immediate judgment. And the hope is that we eventually perceive the lighter side of the person ‘mdash; that’s what you see in the play.’
But underscoring its character parallels and motifs ‘mdash; blue linen, at once Shahriyar’s drapery, morphs into oceanic abyss and, suddenly, a Gaza baby’s blanketing ‘mdash; is the play’s grandiose eulogy of storytelling itself, and the tug-of-war between destiny and free will. In all her sagacity, Dahna reasons to Alan that they’re ‘trapped in this grand narrative’ maybe trying to defy that narrative, or reinvent it.’
But an overambitious moral agenda is ultimately the play’s most tragic flaw. Both in ancient empire and intra-Middle Eastern warfare, ‘1001’ barrages us with far too many themes that list off like Supreme Court cases ‘mdash; man v. woman, antiquity v. modernity, Western liberality v. Eastern traditionalism, Palestine v. Israel ‘mdash; for a panoply of virtues, as cloying at times as baklava.
Yet this syrupy sweetness comes packed with energetic performances, offering a surrealistic mind-body experience. Echoing the play’s nothing-is-accidental ideology, Rubinstein recalled the cast’s concerted effort at ‘working physically, working so that they’re not only telling the story just through their mouths but through their whole beings and their bodies, through gesture and shape and floor patterns and tempo ‘mdash; all to tell the stories ‘hellip; like an electrical field between everybody.’
This field arises, in large part, from a magnetizing fusion of mystical Persian music and the harsh edginess of more modern R’amp;B and Western pop. From within sultry Sufi verses in Farsi erupts a Bollywood beat, unveiling a kaleidoscope of richly hued Islamic garb and kurtas.
‘1001’ capitalizes on the universal appeal of those traditional sounds, galvanizing the audience with transciendant, rhythmic pulses of the tanbur and breathy serenades of the ney, melting into their electro-pop counterparts in Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic.’ An inebriating sentimentalism then suspends us as the gushy lyrics of Landon Pigg and Andrew Bird unfurl over the speakers, supplementing Dahna and Alan’s courtship.
What Rubinstein’s adaptation also engenders is a visually mesmerizing set that, in fully engaging its audience, harkens back to Dahna’s rhetorical question: ‘What are any one of us but a collection of stories?’ Each of the interlinked ‘aquapods,’ full water bottles that symbolize each of the king’s beheaded virgins, reflect light in prismatic shafts across the stage.
In weaving its political and temporal themes, ‘1001’ simultaneously unravels the tenets of traditional storytelling. It blurs the lines between ancient lore and reality by immersing us in a whole new world, providing a theatrical experience that is shining, shimmering and, quite simply, splendid.