Digital media becomes the perfect "ally" for a group of actors collectively creating a play about Mao Tse Tung's Cultural Revolution. As their work-in-progress starts morphing into a propaganda play about the play itself, disturbing questions arise as to who, or what, is controlling the narrative.
In this provocative play masquerading as a stand-up comedy routine, an Indian intersex person explores history, mythology, gender roles. . . and high school. Funny, cynical, inventive and intensely charismatic, Brahman/i takes on more than a dozen unforgettable characters in a fascinating life story that most of us can barely even begin to imagine.
By turns comic and appalling, Unmanned dramatizes the lives of two drone operators in a remote desert in the American Southwest—one, a retired male fighter pilot too terrified to fly again; the other, a young female gamer who has never flown. This sets the stage for an exploration of the bizarre and disturbing profession of the military drone “pilot” and the ways in which technology has radically altered contemporary life and warfare.
The Translator tells the story of Sammy, an English-Arabic translator who defected from Syria, and Zaid, his politically active brother who is arrested for peacefully demonstrating against the regime. A fearful Sammy illegally returns to Syria in order to find his brother and in the process discovers his courage.
In 1880s Damascus, two rival clerics are mired in a feud that tears the city apart. Political ambition, religious fundamentalism, and sexual hypocrisy fan the theatrical flames in this blistering critique of patriarchy and power in the Arab world.
Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous (1941–1997) has been called both the Bertolt Brecht and the Wole Soyinka of the Arab theatre. His plays are to the Arab world what Vaclav Havel’s plays were to the Iron Curtain.
When Sadia travels to India to volunteer with the exiled Tibetan refugee community, she never imagines that she will meet the love of her life. Caught in a whirlwind romance, she returns with new love to America and they quickly marry. Not long after the wedding, Sadia discovers a dark, twisted side to him that eventually threatens her life. Struggling to escape the physical and psychological violence that has become her daily life, she discovers the enlightened Sufi poet Rumi, whose spiritual insights guide her to freedom.
Meet Abdul Samee: his father is Iraqi and his mother is Puerto Rican. Longing to shed his cultural identity, he changes his name to Sam, marries an American, and does everything in his power to turn his back on his heritage. But when Sam meets Yasmina, a beautiful woman from his father’s homeland, he begins to learn that a tree without roots cannot stand for long.
Sacred Stages: A Church, A Theatre, and A Story (28min, 37sec), tells the unique and inspiring story of the relationship between the First United Methodist Church at the Chicago Temple—Chicago's oldest Christian congregation—and Silk Road Rising, a theatre company founded in response to 9/11 and dedicated to showcasing playwrights of Asian and Middle Eastern backgrounds. A shared commitment to storytelling, racial and economic justice, and LGBT inclusion characterizes this profound partnership between a religious community and a secular theatre.
