Christmas Mubarak is a first-of-its-kind musical/theatre interplay of the Quranic and New Testament stories that celebrates the miraculous birth, life, and ascension of Jesus. This festive holiday performance features actors from our Silk Road communities and choir members from the First United Methodist Church at The Chicago Temple.
Anu Bhatt combines the personal with the poetic in her one-woman show about depression, body image, and confronting sexual abuse. Seeking to balance and embrace two identities, Bhatt explores her South Asian American background with courage and insightful humor. A mix of raw memories, lyricism and tough truths, Hollow/Wave is a daring dance for empowerment through a sea of imperfection.
Having fled Iran where he was imprisoned for being a gay man, a damaged Razi arrives at his sister's doorstep in Chicago only to disrupt the life she and her American husband built together. As the Chicago Cubs vie to make history, rivalries of a different kind simmer in the Uptown two-flat that Razi tries to call home. With echoes of A Streetcar Named Desire, Novid Parsi's world premiere drama probes the boundaries between family, loss, prejudice, and desire.
As Louise prepares a TEDx Talk on the Migratory Patterns of the North American Monarch Butterfly, her three sons are on the hunt to find their father so they can avoid being drafted into the Korean army. Part nature documentary, part TED Talk, A Great Migration maps one family's search for identity, unity, and a destination they are reluctant to embrace.
Nightingale’s husband has been missing for nearly two decades. She’s convinced that he was abducted by aliens and will return on the twentieth anniversary of his disappearance. As Nightingale grows increasingly invested in her fantasies, her daughter and colleague grapple with an unsettling possibility: What if her husband doesn’t come back?
Performed as part of Silk Road Rising’s New China Festival: Staged Readings of Plays from the Chinese Speaking World
Two strangers find themselves stranded outside of both time and place with only each other for company. Consumed by their personal loneliness, neither is able to truly listen to what the other has to say. Trapped in the existential crisis that follows a hook-up, their frustrations begin leading them down a path of mutual self-destruction.
Performed as part of Silk Road Rising’s New China Festival: Staged Readings of Plays from the Chinese Speaking World
On the eve of Chinese New Year, Dan is finally returning to China after several years in the U.S. But before the Tang family can celebrate a reunion, they must first confront their national, cultural, and political differences if they are to understand why Dan is really back—and why he immigrated to America in the first place.
Performed as part of Silk Road Rising’s New China Festival: Staged Readings of Plays from the Chinese Speaking World
German Iranian playwright Mehdi Moradpour’s Pure Land, nominated for the Munich Prize for German Drama, traces the story of Tara, a pregnant Middle Eastern woman seeking political asylum amidst crippling bureaucracy and crumbling relationships. Neil Blackadder’s translation captures the poetry that won Moradpour the prestigious exil-DramatikerInnenpreis, a German theatre award for outstanding playwrights-in-exile.
Pure Land pits a torturous past against an uncertain future with sobering effect.
What does privacy mean in the digital age? P3M5 is a groundbreaking transatlantic theater project featuring five-minute plays from internationally renowned playwrights.
Spanning from the Ottoman Empire to New York City, and three generations of an Armenian and Dominican family, Adriana Sevahn Nichols' Night Over Erzinga explores how a man can lose everything but his heart, and how a grandmother can reach through time, unearth an untold story, and bring her children “home.” From collective tragedy to personal triumph, ancestors reunite with the living in a breathtakingly beautiful journey toward making peace with the past and reclaiming one’s heritage.
Performed as part of Eastern Christians: Commemorating Genocide, Confronting the Future
Staged readings of three plays translated from Chinese to English that highlight the work of contemporary playwrights from the Chinese speaking world. Stylistically and aesthetically diverse, the featured plays examine a Chinese society rife with tensions between tradition and accelerating change, consumerism and communism, and authoritarianism and personal freedom. New China Festival will also include a panel discussion about the state of theatre in the Chinese speaking world and the insights American audiences can gain from Chinese plays.
