ChicagoNow
June 28, 2012
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.
Read MoreUnveiled Reviews /
Chicago Tribune
Chris Jones
June 14, 2015
"Rohina Malik, the hugely talented writer-actress... is a remarkable new theatrical voice in Chicago. In her rich, upbeat and very enjoyable 70-minute collection of five character studies of Muslim women in modern-day America, Malik gives voice to characters from whom we hear far too little in the theater."
Chicago Tribune
Nina Metz
June 15, 2015
A "terrific show... intellectually engrossing work of theater"
Pioneer Press
Tom Witom
June 15, 2015
"Unveiled offers a provocative, insightful and uplifting theater experience."
Chicago Reader
Jack Helbig
June 15, 2015
"Powerful solo show... five riveting tales of Muslim women"
Chicago Examiner
Catey Sullivan
June 14, 2015
“A compelling 70-minute piece rich with illuminating surprises, drawing the audience into worlds that are both unique and truly universal. It is terrifically entertaining."
Reviews - Re-Spiced: A Silk Road Cabaret /
Hedy Weiss of Chicago Sun-Times writes:
"The show is a smart, incisive, 90-minute collage of songs about the Far East, Southeast Asia and the Middle East — drawn from both the Broadway and pop music songbooks, and deftly interspersed with brief interludes of prose and poetry from writers spanning the 11th to the late 20th centuries."
Read the full review by CLICKING HERE
Kerry Reid of Chicago Tribune writes:
"This is the rare cabaret evening that allows you to both enjoy and examine the cultural assumptions underpinning some well-loved songs — and the prose sections in "Re-Spiced" may send you on a mission to add some intriguing new flavors to your reading list."
Read the full review by CLICKING HERE
Katy Walsh of ChicagoNOW writes:
"The entire show is one big melting pot of international experiences. The cast are this hearty stew of personalities and capabilities. It’s a tasty and substantial treat."
Read the full review by CLICKING HERE
Kris Vire of Time Out Chicago writes:
"Creator Khoury, dramaturg Neal Ryan Shaw and director Steve Scott draw a compelling through line of the West’s long history of alternately fetishizing and fearing those “unimagined lands.” A winning cast of eight ably sells both that story and Ryan Brewster’s accomplished arrangements."
Read the full review by CLICKING HERE
Brian Hieggelke of Newcity writes:
"Woven into a clever and entertaining pastiche of songs, many focused on the “exoticness” of the East, are text excerpts drawn from the Western canon, the likes of Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton and Friedrich Nietzsche that punctuate or counterpoint the verses."
Read the full review by CLICKING HERE
Jack Helbig of Chicago Reader writes:
"The mix of contemporary and classic tunes alone makes this cabaret worth seeing. But Re-Spiced is smarter than your average evening of great music because Jamil Khoury has wittily turned his playlist into a 90-minute meditation on the myriad ways in which the West gets the East wrong."
Read the full review by CLICKING HERE
David Zak of Chicago Stage Style writes:
"There is a lot to like and learn from Re-Spiced, Silk Road Rising's new cabaret that lets us listen and laugh, reflecting on how far we have come, and how far there is yet to go."
Read the full review by CLICKING HERE
Rory Leahy of Centerstage writes:
"Re-Spiced is a rare and admirable production that perfectly combines thought provoking content with an overwhelming sensibility of lighthearted fun."
Read the full review by CLICKING HERE
Catey Sullivan of Chicago Theater Beat writes:
"This is first and foremost cabaret, intended to entertain as opposed to enlighten. That it manages to also accomplish the latter is a testament to Khoury’s eye for creating a musical collage as well as the cast’s collective musical skills and director Steve Scott’s astute navigation of the tricky borderlands between comedy and tragedy."
Read the full review by CLICKING HERE
Ruth Smerling of Theatreworld Internet Magazine writes:
"Re-Spiced devised by the innovative and bold Jamil Khoury is fun, uplifting and ripe with the hope, promise and energy delivered by a boundless youthful cast. Re-Spiced is a great show for the whole family."
Read the full review by CLICKING HERE
Minita Gandhi of Chicago Theatre Minority Report writes:
"This production is sharp, touching, and fun. It’s Ice Cube, Joan Baez, and Rodgers and Hammerstein. It’s cabaret with a conscience. It demands an audience as eclectic as its tightknit ensemble and vivid message."
Read the full review by CLICKING HERE
Bob Bullen of Chicago Theatre Addict writes:
"Re-Spiced: A Silk Road Cabaret isn’t your mother’s cabaret. It’s bold, colorful, eclectic, relevant and shockingly subversive. I’ve seen a lot of cabaret in my time, but nothing quite like the experience I had last night."
Read the full review by CLICKING HERE
Playwright Bio - Christmas at Christine's /
Christine Bunuan is a veteran of the Chicago stage. She has been seen on the Silk Road Rising stage in A Silk Road Cabaret: Broadway Sings The Silk Road and Re-Spiced: A Silk Road Cabaret. She was in the first national tour and Chicago sit down company of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (David Stone Productions). She was most recently seen as Calphurnia and Metella Cimber in Julius Caesar at Writers Theatre. Her other credits include Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, TimeLine Theatre Company, Mercury Theater Chicago, Chicago Children’s Theatre, Chicago Dramatists, Marriott Lincolnshire, Drury Lane Theatre, Mason Street Warehouse, TheatreSquared, and many more. Recently, Christine assistant directed shows at AboutFace and Prologue Theatre, expanding her knowledge of how things work on the other side of the table. She also made her first television appearance on the hit TV show Chicago PD this season. She earned her BFA in Acting from The Theatre School at DePaul University. She is a proud member of Actors’ Equity Association and serves on the Central Regional Board. Please feel free to visit her website www.christinebunuan.com for more info.
Sponsors - Christmas at Christine's /
Season Sponsor
Reviews - Christmas at Christine's /
True to holiday cabaret tradition, Chicago actor and singer Christine Bunuan fills her solo-show stocking with songs ranging from naughty to nice, sardonic to sentimental. But what Bunuan also offers in "Christmas at Christine's," the first holiday show at Silk Road Rising, is her perspective as a child of Filipino immigrants. When you're raised by people who arrived in the United States with $500 in their pockets, the holidays are bound to focus on love, not lucre.
Bunuan, a veteran of past ensemble revues at Silk Road as well as of "Avenue Q" at the Mercury Theater (where she played Christmas Eve), brings a mix of sass, soul and sweetness to her songs and stories, directed by J.R. Sullivan and with Ryan Brewster at the piano. She also accompanies herself on ukulele with charming insouciance on Nat King Cole's "The Happiest Christmas Tree."
It has its contrivances, to be sure — the "late" entrance with Bunuan dashing in, shopping bags and cellphone in hand, feels a little shopworn as an opening gambit, even with her determinedly cheerful delivery of "We Need a Little Christmas." But as she settles into the groove, the show takes on richer shadings. And given the current national mood, a show that celebrates diversity (Bunuan's husband, fellow actor Sean Patrick Fawcett, is Jewish) and the can-do spirit of those who pursue impossible dreams provides some needed catharsis.
Not all of Bunuan's selections are holiday songs. Indeed, she sings "The Impossible Dream" from "Man of La Mancha" as a tribute to her father's indomitable spirit. (From that $500, her father became an engineer in the U.S. while her parents raised three children and now own two homes.) Her years-in-the-making relationship with Fawcett, which began when both were undergrads, gets a hat tip with "Mr. Snow" from "Carousel" — he played the title character (who of course has nothing to do with seasonally appropriate precipitation) in a college production that they both worked on.
Part of the show serves also as tribute to her extended family in the Philippines, whose images fill an onstage photo album and are reflected in grainy projections. The death of an uncle at Christmastime reminds us of the fragility of life and the need to appreciate loved ones when they're here.
Bunuan's own Catholic faith lies upon the show with an easy grace, mixed with Filipino traditions such as the "parol," a star-shaped lantern recalling the Star of Bethlehem and the rollicking Tagalog holiday song "Ang Pasko Ay Sumapit." The Nativity scene on a downstage table serves as a poignant reminder that the first Christmas story was about a couple like Bunuan's parents, far from their own home, trying to make a new family in the most difficult of circumstances.
There's also a touch of the macabre in Jim Rusk's twisted "Pretty Little Dolly" (made popular by Mona Abboud) in which the inventory of what the longed-for toy can do grows increasingly disturbing. Bunuan's story of performing in the Goodman's "A Christmas Carol" with a sick-to-his-tummy Tiny Tim recalls the late Spalding Gray's story of a vomiting Wally Webb in "Our Town."
But those mild trips to the gross side are balanced by tributes to friendship, including "You've Got a Friend in Me" and, as a hat tip to her "Avenue Q" role, "The More You Ruv Someone." There's also "Moishe Baby," a Jewish-themed parody of "Santa Baby" created by Bunuan, Brewster, Fawcett, Silk Road founder Jamil Khoury, and Nikki Fawcett.
The show includes a guest artist each night on one number. On opening night, Bunuan's childhood friend and Chicago cabaret star Johanna McKenzie Miller belted out "O Holy Night." When she hit the lyrics "His law is love and his gospel is peace," it provided a stirring balm for troubled times. Bunuan's low-key but impassioned delivery of Peter, Paul and Mary's menorah song, "Light One Candle," also carried an emotional punch.
Silk Road Rising's determined ecumenical approach to religion has been apparent since its founding. It seems wholly appropriate that their first holiday show should celebrate immigrant success, family loyalty and friendship. Bunuan's show has its self-conscious moments, to be sure. But Bunuan brings beguiling wit and warmth that transcends cheap sentiment. And where else are you going to hear "Silent Night" in Tagalog onstage this year?
Kerry Reid is a freelance critic.
This sweet, lighthearted holiday cabaret, written and performed by Christine Bunuan, weaves together holiday songs, some familiar, some not, with Bunuan’s recollections of Christmases past. Bunuan has a lovely voice and a winning onstage rapport with her laconic accompanist, Ryan Brewster, and her song selection, though mild, is diverting (a Jewish parody of “Santa Baby,” called “Moishe Baby,” is one the high points) . But it’s her deceptively simple stories about life in theater or visiting her extended family in the Philippines that make this show a cut above your average holiday revue. It helps that Bunuan has a very likable, relaxed stage presence and a born raconteur’s ability to make even the most mundane tale riveting. —Jack Helbig
SILK ROAD RISING’S CHRISTMAS AT CHRISTINE’S REVIEW – ALL HEART
Trust Silk Road Rising to make its very first holiday show – Christmas at Christine’s -- not only multi-cultural but free of schmaltz and glitter too. Directed by J.R. Sullivan, Christine Bunuan’s 90-minute meander through her own Christmases Past nudges her audience towards a more meaningful Christmas Present. Bunuan, a Filipino American actress married to a Jewish American actor, offers up a cabaret-style pastiche of songs, snapshots, chit-chat and reflections about her favorite holiday.
Silk Road CHRISTMAS AT CHRISTINA'S
A personal touch
The one-woman show is somewhat disjointed; Bunuan is a vibrant performer, not a skilled storyteller. But her hodgepodge is so personal that the bumpy style eventually becomes part of the fun. With no performer in sight as the opening lights come up on Silk Road Rising’s intimate stage, music director/accompanist Ryan Brewster stalls with a few bars of “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.” Finally, late-running Bunuan bursts onstage, laden with shopping bags and plenty of adrenaline. She is then interrupted by a desperate call from her out-of-town mother who can’t remember her email password. Midway through the show, Bunuan invites a visiting friend to sing an exquisite rendition of “Oh Holy Night.” Like so much else that happens onstage, the reunion of these actresses is palpably joyful.
Many families make the season
Family bonds are critical to this Chicago-based actress, whether it’s her close-knit Catholic Filipino kin, beloved husband Sean or the cast of a show. Touchingly, she describes her parents who arrived from the Philippines with a mere $500 and used a rolling TV cart as a crib for their infant daughter. Christmas memories, sometimes enhanced by projected photos, do not include lavish presents or decor; instead they are anecdotes of family and friends with deep connections. When Bunuan sings the Tagalog song, “Ang Pasko Ay Sumapit,” she reinforces the unifying impact of Christmas carols in any language.
Bunuan demonstrates her affection for Sean’s Jewish heritage by filling a Hanukkah menorah with candles and gamely chanting the Hebrew blessing, an annual ritual in their home. Bunuan shares another holiday tradition -- a backstage potluck meal between matinee and evening performances of Goodman Theatre’s A Christmas Carol. One year, she explains, Tiny Tim ate far too much and later “tossed his cookies” at the Cratchits’ dinner table onstage.
Unexpected emotion
Petit, buoyant and charismatic, Bunuan delivers a topnotch performance. Brewster’s accompaniment is fluid and precise. Yeaji Kim’s festive set – suggesting a contemporary condo dressed for Christmas – leaves Bunuan enough room to maneuver freely. At times, Christmas at Christine’s rambling format wears thin. Ultimately, however, the show makes its case: the holiday season is about relationships. When she invites everyone to join her in “Silent Night,” she’s built such a strong bond with her audience that the response is immediate. Hearing Silk Road Rising’s small theatre swell with voices, Bunuan is full of unexpected emotion – and so are we.
Recommended for: people of all ages and faiths who want to celebrate the season
Not recommended for: people with Grinch and Scrooge-type attitudes
BROADWAYWORLD - SILK ROAD RISING PRESENTS FIRST-EVER HOLIDAY SHOW CHRISTMAS AT CHRISTINE'S
Silk Road Rising presents their first-ever holiday show with the world premiere of Christmas at Christine's, written and performed by Christine Bunuan and directed by J.R. Sullivan. The production will run December 1st to 23rd, 2016 at Silk Road Rising located at 77 W. Washington St., Lower Level, Chicago, IL, 60602. The Press Opening is Friday, December 2nd at 8:00pm.
This new holiday musical revue puts a Silk Road spin on the Christmas season. Chicago favorite Christine Bunuan invites you into her world with Christmas at Christine's. Journey from California to Chicago to the Philippines to a Catholic-Jewish household, as Christine sings her way through the holiday songbook and a lifetime of yuletide memories.
The creative team for Christmas at Christine's includes Christine Bunuan (Playwright/Actor),J.R. Sullivan (Director), Ryan Brewster (Musical Director), Helen Colleen Lattyak (Stage Manager), Corey Pond (Production Manager), Yeaji Kim (Set and Projections Designer), Kristof Janezic (Lighting Designer and Master Electrician), Katie Vaughters (Costume Designer), Eric Backus (Sound Designer), and Alec Long (Props Master).
About the Artists
Christine Bunuan (Actor/Playwright) is a veteran of the Chicago stage. She earned her BFA in Acting from The Theatre School at DePaul University and has worked ever since. She has been seen on the Silk Road Rising stage in A Silk Road Cabaret: Broadway Sings The Silk Road and Re-Spiced: A Silk Road Cabaret. She was in the first national tour and Chicago sit down company of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (David Stone Productions). Other theatre companies where she has performed include Goodman, Steppenwolf, Chicago Shakespeare, TimeLine, Mercury, Chicago Children's Theatre, Chicago Dramatists, Marriott Lincolnshire, Drury Lane Oakbrook, Mason Street Warehouse, TheatreSquared, and many more. Recently, Christine assistant directed shows at AboutFace and Prologue Theatre, expanding her knowledge of how things work on the other side of the table. She is a proud member of Actors' Equity Association and serves on the Central Regional Board.
J.R. Sullivan (Director) is a director, producer, and writer, having worked in theaters nationwide as well as heading companies as artistic director. He was the Artistic Director of New York's Off-Broadway Pearl Theatre Company, presented with a Drama Desk Award in 2011, where he directed productions of Hard Times, Playboy of the Western World, Widowers' Houses, Biography, The Importance of Being Earnest, Richard II, A Moon for the Misbegotten, and the New York premiere of Wittenberg. Sullivan was the founder and producing director of the New American Theater in northern Illinois, and also served as associate artistic director for the Utah Shakespeare Festival, where he directed productions ranging from Shakespeare toTennessee Williams, including productions of Richard III, Hamlet, Henry V, The Glass Menagerie, and most recently, Amadeus. His work has also been seen in regional theaters nationwide, including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Theatre X, Philadelphia's Arden Theatre, the Studio Theatre in Washington DC, the Delaware Theatre Company, and the Resident Ensemble Players at the University of Delaware. In Chicago he has directed for Northlight Theatre, American Theatre Company, A Red Orchid Theatre, Live Bait Theatre, Prop Theatre, and the Onyx Theatre. His adaptations of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, in collaboration with Joseph Hanreddy, have been produced at regional houses nationwide, including Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, the Oregon and Utah Shakespeare festivals, South Coast Repertory Theater, Round House Theatre, People's Light & Theater Company, The Cincinnati Playhouse, and Connecticut Rep.
NEED A LITTLE CHRISTMAS? NORTHSHORE PERFORMER TO PREMIERE NEW HOLIDAY SHOW
Singer and actor Christine Bunuan, whose talents have been seen from Writers' Theatre's stage in Glencoe to Oakbrook's Drury Lane Theatre, is combining her musical talents, heritage, and love of the Christmas season in her world-premiere show, "Christmas at Christine's."
Bunuan's parents immigrated from the Phillipines, and she grew up in a household that combined Filipino Christmas traditions with American values. "Christmas at Christine's" offers a chance for her to combine song and storytelling to create a holiday musical revue for the whole family.
Christine, who played Jasmine in the musical "Aladdin" at the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire and was seen on Broadway in Chicago's production of the musical "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee," says she has always wanted to work on an original piece that was "personal, heartfelt and fun." She invites audiences into her world and shares a lifetime of touching holiday memories, from stories about seeing her husband perform in "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" to a time when she had to celebrate Christmas in Florida while on tour.
"I was inspired to write this musical revue to honor the people in my life whose backgrounds and cultures have helped shape so much of my life," she says of her upcoming world-premiere. "Christmas at Christine's" presents her with a chance to share that heritage with an audience, connecting tales of her travels from California to the Philippines and Chicago with a wide array of favorites from the holiday songbook.
These songs are cast in a new light thanks to the life lessons Christine shares along her journey, universalizing her experiences. At a first rehearsal recently, many members of the production team teared up as they themselves remembered their loved ones and holiday traditions.
She explains that her visits to the Philippines "enriched my life" and inspired her to dig deeper into her own heritage. Bunuan's own holiday traditions developed further upon meeting and marrying her husband, a Jewish man. She now affectionately refers to herself as a "Christmas Jew," someone who celebrates Hanukkah as well as Christmas, in keeping with her new family's traditions.
Christine's hope is to spread a message of love through her own yuletide memories. To her, music is a vital way to achieve this. "Music is a huge part of my life," she says. "It's a different way of expressing yourself." The inclusion of holiday standards, love songs, and even some familiar tunes from Broadway allow her to deepen her connection with audiences.
"It's fun to get stuff, but what I really like is figuring out what I can give," Christine says. To her, "Christmas at Christine's," which will premiere at Silk Road Rising in Chicago on December 1st and run through December 23rd, is her gift to audiences this holiday season. "I want to invite people into my home to have a fun time and enjoy being together." Tickets and more information available at www.SilkRoadChristmas.org
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Copyright © 2016, Chicago Tribune
Learn More - Christmas at Christine's /
Artistic Statement by Playwright and Performer Christine Bunuan
I am so grateful to Jamil, Malik and everyone at Silk Road Rising for always being so supportive of my work. As our friendship grew and they became a part of my artistic family, we wanted to collaborate on a project that was personal, heartfelt and fun—something that combined family, friends and my Filipino culture. This naturally lead us to my favorite holiday: Christmas! Through song and storytelling, I was inspired to write this musical revue to honor the people in my life whose backgrounds and cultures have helped shape so much of my life. Especially the holidays! Ho ho ho, hee hee hee!
My parents immigrated from the Philippines to the United States because they wanted to give their children a better life. They struggled to raise a family in a foreign country and succeeded in combining our Filipino traditions with American values. My experience of visiting the Philippines, my family’s original home, enriched my life and inspired me to explore and deepen my connection to my heritage. And Christmas is no exception! “Hay! Sarap ng buhay! Maligayang pasko!”
I am very close to my family but I had a dream of becoming an actor and that drew me to this amazing city. With the support of my family, I left California and moved to Chicago to go to school at The Theatre School, DePaul University. I was very fortunate that my lifelong best friend and now husband, Sean (who’s Jewish, so seriously, talk about adding new flavors to my Christmas story! Oy Vey! But that’s another story...), he also got accepted to the same school. So we each had a piece of home with us to start a new chapter in our lives. And as we grew to learn our new city, we fell in love with it and found our new artistic home.
My musical celebration is a journey to my different homes, both with my family in California and the Philippines, and my artistic family here in Chicago and across the country. I think all travelers would agree, one of the best parts of any journey is finally coming home. My holiday adventures ultimately bring me back to my husband where we celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah in our little Catholic-Jewish corner of the world. It has been pure joy going back in time and reliving all these memories through songs, some that are funny and delightful, and others that are sentimental and classic...a mixtape of holiday standards along with love songs and showtunes. They have shaped my Christmas each year, adding just a little something new to my ever growing family tradition, like a new ornament on the tree.
Learn More - Ultra American: A Patriot Act /
Artistic Statement by Playwright and Performer Azhar Usman
"Ultra American: A Patriot Act" is the result of many years of wondering and wandering all over the planet, trying to make sense of my own existence in a seemingly insane world–a world full of contradictions, paradoxes, and fundamental incongruences. A world that is presently on fire: with political violence and state surveillance reaching dizzying heights, religious extremism on the rise, unprecedented global communication, technological inter-dependence, and personal connectivity, the seemingly unstoppable tide of Secular Humanism (supported by an atheist-leaning, Modernist philosophical worldview), the apparent end of privacy, and radically unequal wealth distribution due to the corporate takeover of just about every aspect of human life. And all of this has happened on America’s watch: under the auspices of the “world’s sole superpower,” The United States of America ... the Empire.
As a citizen of the Empire, for the past four decades, I have been negotiating a set of competing identities inside myself: Indian, American, Muslim. What does it mean to be an Indian? An American? A Muslim? In the modern world, no less, where even the questions seem problematic, because I never felt like any of those labels really fit, not as nouns anyway. Perhaps as adjectives. To be Indian is, in a sense, different than calling oneself “an Indian.” Just as being American is a universe away from calling oneself “an American.” I am very comfortable saying that I am Muslim, but calling myself “a Muslim” triggers a whole range of disclaimers, tensions, and, perhaps, disquieting confessions about my relationship with the other billion and a half humans who claim the same label. Several of the assumptions and realities underlying each of those dimensions of identity clash with one another, resulting in contradictions, paradoxes, and confusions: an internal conflict that mirrors the crazy-making world we all inhabit today. What does citizenship entail today? Race? Ethnicity? Religious affiliation? These are complex discussions and debates.
And it is in this potent cocktail of competing identities that I have attempted to forge a holistic, balanced, cogent, informed, and intelligent view of the world. Indeed, what is an “identity” really, but a lens through which to make sense of the world around us? Along the way, the following ideas resonated deeply:
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
~ W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
This notion of “double-consciousness” articulated by Du Bois (and further developed by Frantz Omar Fanon in his concept of “dual consciousness”) has become a way of life for hybrid- (tri-brid?) identity Americans. Du Bois rhetorically asked: “How does it feel to be a problem?”
In 2016 America, one of the leading presidential candidates has declared that “Islam hates us,” and that he would call for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States. The politics of fear of such ideologues makes Thomas Paine’s call for “thoughtful patriotism” more urgent than ever. Samuel Johnson said: “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Well, if that is true, then the entire Empire today is run by scoundrels.
Religion-inspired, political violence is at the heart of the ideological conflict. But as the British humorist and polymath Sir Peter Ustinov observed: “Terrorism is the war of the poor. And war is the terrorism of the rich.” So what does all of this mean? Was Samuel Huntington right? Is the world on an unavoidable collision course, headed for the fated “Clash of Civilizations?”
It is against this backdrop, and with all of these open queries, that we recall the sagacious comments of Meg Greenfield in 1979, at the height of the U.S.-Iranian hostage crisis. She wrote in Newsweek:
We are heading into an expansion of the American relationship with that complex of religion, culture and geography known as Islam…no part of the world is more important to our own well-being at the moment – and probably for the foreseeable future…[and] no part of the world is more hopelessly and systematically and stubbornly misunderstood by us. [Emphasis added.]
Ouch. That is quite an indictment: Stubborn, systematic misinformation–indeed disinformation–can make one hopeless indeed. At a time when 62 individual multi-billionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of earth combined, intelligent citizens must ask difficult questions. For example, can it really be true that six media companies own and operate well over 90% of American mass media? ALL of the major film studios, TV channels and cable networks, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, and book publishers are owned by just six mega-conglomerates: Comcast, Disney, 21st Century Fox, Time Warner, CBS Corporation, and Viacom. These are the creators of the cognitive frames that dominate our world. They set the parameters of the discourse. They define our perceptions of reality. They control our emotions, our thoughts, our subconsciouses, day to day, moment to moment.
The media’s magical spell is so strong that it can actually cause one who awakens from it to wonder if anything we are told is true at all. This line of questioning has spiritual consequences, to be sure, and can actually lead one down Philosophy’s most popular rabbit hole, to ask: “Is anything real?” The great Sufi mystic Abul Hasan ash-Shadhili taught: “The Sufi sees his own existence like particles of dust, made visible by a ray of sunlight: neither real nor unreal.”
Ultra American: A Patriot Act is a modest attempt to push back, to explore the above-stated, macro/global themes through micro/local examples, in an attempt to make sense of it all. Armed with nothing but personal stories, reflections, jokes, and funny one-liners, it is the most ambitious creative project of my career. It is a tall order, no doubt. But alas, what choice does an artist have other than to toss a pebble into the ocean, hoping and praying that perhaps it can cause a ripple that will reach the other side of the world? It is a task that should properly be considered next to impossible. But as my standup idol and mentor, Dave Chappelle, taught me: “Next to impossible is the precursor to dope.”
Hope you enjoy the show.
LOVE+LIGHT,
-azhar
Reviews - Ultra American: A Patriot Act /
"A LAUGH RIOT." -- EDGE MEDIA NETWORK
"To be part of a Silk Road audience is to be entertained -- and educated. It's never a bad thing when good work also leaves one better informed. I had to view "Ultra American: A Patriot Act," the one-man show from American Muslim comedian Azhar Usman to learn, for example, that there are less than 16 million Jews on the planet...I should have wept over this revelation but I was too busy laughing at Usman's description of growing up in Skokie, attending so many bar mitzvahs that he became jealous of the "chosen" people. The man labeled "America's Funniest Muslim" by CNN also manages to turn a life spent profiled by airport security and fellow passengers into a laugh riot."
SELF-RACIAL PROFILING FOR FUN AND PROFIT -- CHICAGO STAGE AND CINEMA
"This wicked piece of 'outsider art' by Indian-American comic Azhar Usman chronicles a powerful post-9/11 perspective—call it 'stand-out stand up.'"
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED -- NEWCITYSTAGE
"...Usman begins his ninety-minute set with an inquiry any person of color can attest to having heard: "Where are you from?" That the question has been derided and parodied past the point of exhaustion by every comedian, commentator and Instagrammer, yet still retains its relevance is a testament to its centrality in the problem of the American mythos: How can a nation founded on ideals of liberty, justice and equality account for its empirical manifestations of disenfranchisement, corruption and discrimination?"
Sponsors - Ultra American: A Patriot Act /
This program was partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.
Season Sponsor
This project was partially supported by CityArts, a grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.
Production Sponsor
Playwright Bio - Ultra American: A Patriot Act /
Azhar Usman is a standup comedian, actor, writer, and producer from Chicago. He was called “America’s Funniest Muslim” by CNN and was named among the “500 Most Influential Muslims in the World” by Georgetown University. Formerly an attorney, he has worked as a performing artist and entertainment industry professional for over a decade. During that time, as co-creator of the internationally- acclaimed standup revue Allah Made Me Funny–The Official Muslim Comedy Tour, he has toured over twenty-five countries, as well as comedy clubs, campuses, and theaters all over the United States. Azhar has worked with many of his favorite comedians, including Jim Gaffigan, Hannibal Buress, Russell Peters, and Dave Chappelle. In fact, he has opened for Chappelle over 50 times over the past decade, becoming one of the comedy legend’s favorite opening acts and causing him to remark: “AZHAR USMAN is UNTOUCHABLE.” His work has been reviewed and/or featured by over 100 major media outlets worldwide, including The New York Times, BBC, FOX News, NPR, and The Economist. Besides standup, Azhar has also appeared on television and film. Azhar is widely regarded to be a pioneer among Muslim standup comedians, and his self-produced 2003 comedy CD SQUARE THE CIRCLE: American Muslim Comedy of Distortion became an underground classic among English-speaking Muslim communities around the world. His work as a solo comic, as well as with the Allah Made Me Funny collective, has inspired a generation of comedians – well over 50 performers – scattered across over a dozen countries.
Playwright Bio - Ziryab, the Songbird of Andalusia /
Ronnie Malley is a musician, theatrical performer, producer, and educator. With a background in Global Music and Performance Studies, Ronnie has collaborated with artists internationally and has composed and consulted for many cultural music projects in film and theater. His recent credits include musician on "The Secret Garden" (Court Theatre), musician and consultant on Disney’s "The Jungle Book" (Goodman Theater, Huntington Theater), associate producer, composer, and actor in "The Sultan's Dilemma" (International Voices Project), co-composer on "The White Snake" (Wuzhen Theater Festival, Old Globe, Guthrie, Goodman, McCarter, Berkeley Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival), actor and principal musician in "Arabian Nights" (Lookingglass, Berkeley, Arena Stage Theatre) and film composition for "At the Gate, Modou: The Hang Player," and "Jon and Davy." Ronnie has produced the albums "Auraad Fathiya," "Saazuk Safar," "Tsikago," "Gypsy Surf," and has appeared as a guest artist on several musical works. He conducts Arabic language artist residencies for Chicago Public Schools through his company Intercultural Music Production. He is also a faculty member at the Old Town School of Folk Music and Chicago Academy for the Arts, as well as a veteran artist with Chicago Arts Partnership in Education. Ronnie performs with the music groups Allos Musica, Duzan Ensemble, Lamajamal, and Surabhi.
Sponsors - Ziryab, the Songbird of Andalusia /
This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
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Reviews - Ziryab, the Songbird of Andalusia /
A stage swathed with oriental rugs. On it a tambourine, a tape deck, a table lamp, a silicone-sleeved glass water bottle, an electric guitar, an amp and a suitcase. Harmonies: racial, religious, cultural and, of course, musical resonating across centuries. A hero who’s fashion-forward, swell at cooking and handy with a lute. “The fifth string is the soul,” announces Ronnie Malley, finessing an oud as the lights come up on Silk Road Rising’s “Ziryab, The Songbird of Andalusia,” which is as multifarious and miscellaneous as its titular polymath could desire.
Written and performed by Malley, “Ziryab” is part biography of the ninth-century Iraqi turned-Cordoban-court-entertainer otherwise known as Abu al-Hasan Ali Ibn Nafi; part autobiographical account of Malley’s experience as a Palestinian-American Muslim growing up in Chicago; part nostalgic history of the peaceful coexistence of Christians, Muslims and Jews in the flourishing of the seven centuries of Moorish reign of Andalusia; and part ethnomusicology lesson that playfully points out echoes of medieval Arabic music in late-twentieth-century heavy metal guitar solos.
The collage makes sense the way “One Thousand and One Nights” does: one tantalizing association at a time. Malley leavens a potentially death-riddled mystery with an insouciant approach to anecdotes that anchors his performance in the earth of Chicago’s standup roots. His memories of fending off the racial obtuseness of his Midwestern peers salts a paean to an utopian past with the grit of contemporaneity.
“Music is how I experience the divine,” he says. The oud, as he points out, evolved into the Greek laouto, the Cuban laùd and the guitar, is the pivot on which the piece as well as all its plays and players turn. In a brisk ninety minutes, Malley is a one-man band of remarkable ingenuity, moving through accents and centuries with agility while tossing off riffs from Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’Mine” and Compay Segundo’s “Chan Chan.” He sings the Hafiz ode, “I see the moon in the face of my beloved,” and transforms from emir to courtier to slave just as the chameleonic Ziryab doubtless would have done a millennium ago. Chronicling the life of the refugee, exile, wanderer and idealist, “Ziryab” makes Malley a medium for cultural resolution then and now. (Irene Hsiao)
MEMORIES OF A TIME BEFORE PEOPLE HAD ALWAYS FOUGHT EACH OTHER - CHICAGO CRITIC
Recently Silk Road Rising, a theatre company devoted to telling the stories of people of Asian and Middle Eastern heritage, has focused on short runs of one-person shows which directly allow people to challenge narratives about themselves. Their latest, Ziryab, the Songbird of Andalusia, is a combination of dramatic lecture and musical presentation, performed by local musician Ronnie Malley, on the subject of an eighth-century polymath whose life proves that many of today’s “ancient” conflicts are not really eternal. Malley’s musicianship is superb, and his interweaving of his own life with the story of Ziryab’s, as well as his highly-informative discourse on the medieval master’s legacy, make an enlightening performance.
Malley starts off the show as himself, and switches between his and his subject’s stories throughout the show. Growing up on Chicago’s south side, Malley experienced his Palestinian heritage as mainly one of music. His family had their own band, which director Anna C. Bahow and set/projections designer Yeaji Kim beautifully illustrate with carpets typical of the family’s performance spaces. Malley himself is proficient on the oud, which produces a lovely sound that is both Spanish and Arab, as well as related instruments. But in Chicago’s highly diverse music scene, he was exposed to styles and instruments from all over the world, and developed a wide range of tastes. It was disappointing, then, that his merely being of Palestinian descent would be so divisive. He describes how he felt constant pressure to make political statements, and encountered not only bigotry against himself, but also people who presumed he shared their anti-Semitism. That is why Malley wanted to bring us the story of Abu’l Hesen ‘Elî ibn Nafî, better known as Ziryab, who lived in a time and place of peaceful multicultural blending.
Ziryab was a black man whose career began in Baghdad, where he studied music at the court of Harun al-Rashid, the most famed of the Abbasid caliphs. His modification of the oud brought him the ruler’s praise, but also the murderous jealousy of his teacher, and he fled to the North African city of Kairouan. After writing a song calling the emir there a racist and a war-monger, he was obliged to flee again, and wound up in Cordoba, which was then experiencing what has been remembered as an age of enlightenment, as well as cultural and scientific progress. Malley connects this story with the large number of middle-eastern refugees today, as well as his own family’s expulsion from Israel. But he also demonstrates music’s power to bridge differences between people, while allowing them to express their own circumstances. We also get a basic run-down of Ziryab’s musical theory, with remains influential.
Malley’s performances on the oud and its descendants, the lute and the guitar, certainly drive home his point about music’s universal reach. His singing and playing alone are sufficient reason to see the show, and his tribute to Ziryab, with help from sound director Eric Backus, makes the past come alive. Malley’s description of medieval Baghdad and Cordoba’s has a rosy tint, and by repeatedly citing Maimonides as an example of a Jew who benefited from the same cultural climate as Ziryab, he implies that the Golden Age lasted in Andalusia for much longer than it did. But he does counter the common, simplistic narrative that Iberia was perfect until it was destroyed by the Catholic Church in one fell swoop. As he points out, tolerance actually crumbled due in large part to intra-Muslim and intra-Christian political fighting. But really, that’s a whole different lecture that doesn’t provide as many opportunities to showcase the artistic exchange that was and is very much real. There’s plenty of focus on strife out there, but Silk Road Rising provides an opportunity to see a better side of history, along with it.
In the basement of the Chicago Temple, playwright/actor/musician Ronnie Malley displays his electric affinity for and considerable fluency in a dozen musical tongues. In 75 minutes this Chicago performer takes us back to the ninth century and deep into our own. On Yeaji Kim’s magic-carpet set, strewn with exotic musical instruments and illustrated by evocative projections and video, Ziryab: The Songbird of Andalusia is a welcome, multi-cultural world premiere from Silk Road Rising. Malley’s labor of love testifies to the power of art to make us at home wherever.
Malley, who grew up on Chicago’s South Side in a Palestinian-American family who refused to feel like exiles, is steeped in global music. Pursuing its sources from Morocco to Iraq, this splendid singer melds regional styles in a stunning showcase where harmony is literal. Along the way he regales us with Arabic poetry, legends and songs that reprise the golden age of Islamic Iberia.
Malley centers this contagious nostalgia among the wonders of Al-Andalus. Southern Spain, of course, is where the mosque of Córdoba, Seville’s magnificent Christian/Islamic Giralda tower, and the palace and gardens of the Alhambra in Granada still proclaim a glorious culture lost in 1491 to Ferdinand and Isabella (Aragon and Castile). For seven centuries Andalusia wasn’t just an architectural wonderland of arabesque filigree and tiled shrines. It saw a diverse Semitic realm of mutual admiration. Here Jewish, Islamic and Christian scholars and artists could learn and create together, a comingling of cultures that has seldom happened since. As Malley says, it’s more important to be good neighbors than good Jews, Arabs or Christians.
Malley fixes his musical evolution to the memory of the great Abu I-Hasan, known as Ziryab (“Nightingale” or “Blackbird” to his Spanish devotes). He was a former slave who lived and worked in Iraq, northern Africa and finally medieval Spain. Ziryab (789-857) was an omni-talented avatar, composing, playing the oud, writing poetry, teaching, and inspiring to today. He proved invaluable to every court where he was preferred–the Abbasids in Baghdad and the castle of Abd ar-Rahman II of the Umayyads in Córdoba. This maker of an astounding 10,000 songs was a master of many trades, gifted in cooking, fashion, weather prediction, botany, geography and astronomy.
But mostly music, as Malley traces his influence through the instruments he plays — dulcimer, lute, even electric guitar, and the moods he conjures with engaging virtuosity. Malley richly regales us with songs that are both time trips and travelogues. His avocation is as religious as artistic. It links him in tolerance to the Abrahamic god of three religions and countless cultures. Malley connects us too. The result is wonderful.
Learn More - Ziryab, the Songbird of Andalusia /
Music as a Gateway to Islamic Culture in "Ziryab, the Songbird of Andalusia"
By R.A. Sheth
One of the most unique aspects of America is how its diverse population enriches its culture. ven the current state of the world, where news of violence and terrorism emphasizes conflicts, it’s difficult to remember a time when people from different cultures co-existed. Yet for seven centuries, Christians, Jews, and Muslims co-existed in Islamic Spain. Inspired by this history, Muslim American playwright and musician Ronnie Malley, who grew up in Oak Lawn has resided in Orland Park, has written his upcoming play, "Ziryab, the Songbird of Andalusia," as an alternative to negative portrayals. The play will perform at Chicago's Silk Road Rising from February 18 through February 28, 2016.
A theatrical performer, producer and multi-talented musician who plays guitar, oud, keyboard and drums, Ronnie Malley is well-known in Chicago’s music community. He is a Chicago native whose family was part of the community that built the Bridgeview Mosque and whose father was part of the first immigrant wave of musicians who came to Chicago in the 1960s. Ronnie first started performing with his family’s band as a teenager, playing at private events like bar mitzvahs and weddings. From his father, Ronnie learned to view music as a community activity as well as a way to highlight and showcase one’s culture.
When people learned of Ronnie’s Middle Eastern heritage, they would often respond with comments like “Oh, those people have been fighting for thousands of years” or “There’s just never going to be any end in sight.” Ronnie disagreed. He knew there was much more to the Middle East than conflict. Music, an integral part of Middle Eastern culture as well as Ronnie’s life, had taught him otherwise. Now, with “Ziryab, the Songbird of Andalusia,” feels compelled to share a story unknown to most people.
In school, Ronnie was aware that there was music before Bach, but he simply wasn’t learning about it. That is, until one of his father’s friends, a Tunisian musician, told him the story of u l-Hasan ‘Ali Ibn Nafi' (better known as Ziryab) former slave who became a well-known court musician and polymath in Al-Andalus (Arabic for Andalusia). Ronnie notes: “Ziryab was not only a wonderful musician who made great progress and innovation in Andalusia and for the Middle East but also on the oud itself.” In fact, Ziryab’s addition of the fifth string on the oud, an instrument similar to the lute, eventually led to the modern guitar.
From the start, Ronnie was fascinated with Ziryab, feeling a connection to this figure from the 9th century: “Here was the missing link I had been looking for all my life.” While Ronnie found few sources on Ziryab in a pre-Internet era, he nevertheless learned that he, like Ziryab himself, inhabited an environment where people had “a kinship to the culture and music.” For Ronnie, music became a gateway to learning about his own culture as well as the diversity of the Middle East and North Africa. “Through music and through the arts, I was able to create an amateur form of ethnography that allowed me to really learn deeply about cultures through the music that comes from those cultures.”
The Al-Andalus of Ziryab’s day was an epicenter of learning and knowledge. Throughout 700 years of Islamic rule, Christians, Jews and Muslims co-existed in peace: “The contribution of Islamic society was more than just religion. Just because it was under Islamic rule doesn’t mean other cultures didn’t have a say. In essence it became a place with a confluence of cultures from East and West.” Al-Andalus, a model of tolerance, enabled a pluralistic society to flourish--in the areas of astronomy, pharmacology and gastronomy to name a few--ushering Europe out of the Dark Ages. This era of cultural riches gave birth to many things we enjoy today in the Western world, like classical music.”
Ronnie’s personal immersion in the local music community recalled the Al-Andalus he had heard about: “It was a melding of different people with different backgrounds to share and contribute to one culture.” Ronnie gives a lot of credit to Chicago’s diverse, bustling and vibrant music scene, where he learned to play Arabic, African, Indian, Greek and even Blues music. “I probably wouldn’t have learned all the music that I did if I had been elsewhere.” He has been fortunate enough to apprentice, collaborate and perform with a lot of well-known visiting international musicians he’s idolized, like the Lebanese singer Tony Hanna. This abundance of opportunities instilled in Ronnie a great sense of responsibility--a desire to give back to the community that shaped him as a musician. This led him to teach guitar and oud at The Old Town School of Folk Music.
Through live Arabic music, poetry and storytelling, “Ziryab, the Songbird of Andalusia” enriches and builds upon the Eurocentric history that Ronnie, and many Americans, have grown up with. As an American and a Muslim who grew up playing both Guns N’ Roses and Simon Shaheen, Ronnie says he aims to “unveil or reveal some truth that exists, especially in the era we live in today, where we hear a lot of vitriol and political rhetoric that may sway public opinion.” Ronnie has played on many stages locally and around the globe but he especially looks forward to sharing Ziryab’s story here, in his hometown. “The theatre to me is a temple. It’s a place where people come for healing, they come looking for answers or discovering new questions."
Learn More - The Hundred Flowers Project /
Some plays are so complex and elusive that it would be a crime for one person to try to explain all its intentions and messages. "The Hundred Flowers Project" is one such play. Still, the history of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party is long and complex; rather than attempt to describe the relevance of this history to "The Hundred Flowers Project," this essay will instead outline that history, so you may draw such conclusions for yourself.
Click HERE to download Dramaturgical Notes; or, read below:
Written by Neal Ryan Shaw
The Cult of Mao and the Communist Revolution (1949)
Around the turn of the nineteenth century, during an effort to bring itself into the modern age, China found itself amidst a turbulent series of events. Once an imperial dynasty, the country withstood numerous incursions by foreign powers—the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century, the Opium Wars with Britain, and the First Sino-Japanese War in the nineteenth century. While warlords and infighting divided China, two groups sought to reunite the country: the Nationalist Party led by Chiang Kai-Shek and the Chinese Communist Party headed by Mao Zedong. The intense and bloody war between these two parties, made worse by the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937 to 1945), ended in the CCP's favor.
I think it is safe to say that the Chinese Communist Party's military success is overwhelmingly owed to the cult of personality around Mao Zedong. Depictions in countless propaganda posters portray Mao as a “great helmsman,” a splendorous father figure. Millions of Chinese bought into this image of Mao, even if they didn’t fully comprehend his vision. As a young man Mao became enthralled with the Marxist-Leninist movement that swept turn-of-the-century Russia, and he developed his own brand of communism for China’s sake. Whereas Marx believed that a proletarian revolution could only be accomplished by an already advanced capitalist society, Mao contended that a rural peasantry could lead the way to social revolution. Much was made of Mao’s upbringing; his childhood as a peasant in the Hunan province of China caused him to identify with the very class that he wished to lead.
It was clear even before the party's victory against the Nationalists that Mao was a relentless and ruthless leader. He contended not only with the Nationalists but also with many in his own party, even driving some to suicide. In light of this history, Mao's love for the people of China coupled with his pathological fear of opposition describes a tantalizing contradiction.
The Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956)
By 1956, the revolution had already seen some successes, successes won with force and suppression. In 1956 Chairman Mao attempted to slow down the progression of political reform by calling for a sort of "airing of grievances." The Chinese Communist Party inaugurated this campaign with a new slogan: Let a hundred flowers bloom/Let a hundred schools of thought contend. The Hundred Flowers Campaign was ostensibly about, in Mao’s words, "promoting progress in the arts and sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land." The idea was that no progress could be made if Mao’s administration held up one school of thought and banned another. The effort ultimately failed, making the Hundred Flowers Campaign such a contradiction, such an ironic failure. Some intellectuals did end up speaking out, many against their will, and for a time real discussions seemed to occur. But the campaign shifted its focus from encouraging dialogue to rooting out dissidents. Those intellectuals who had been encouraged to voice their disagreements with the Party were gathered up and sent to prison labor camps in a so-called Anti-Rightist Movement the following year.
The Great Leap Forward (1958–1961)
Not wishing to focus too much on punishing the outspoken, Mao and the CCP turned their attention to more positive and substantive reforms. Thus was born the Great Leap Forward, a grand economic and industrial vision that the party hoped would not only catapult China into a new industrial age but also prove that the Soviet economic model was inferior to his own. Propaganda posters for the movement certainly demonstrated Mao’s optimistic vision. Proud Chinese workers smile as they toil in gloriously cloudy or oceanic fields, the filtered sunlight illuminating the fruits of their labor. In practice, the Great Leap involved reorganizing China’s rural communities into new communes, where all shared equally in day-to-day duties as well as in the industrial work. Some of this work, such as the building of roads and bridges, succeeded. More numerous and infamous were the projects that failed, like those involving unskilled workers smelting steel in poorly constructed and highly inefficient smelters; workers couldn’t make quota and were forced to break down their own cookware to sustain production.
It is no understatement to say that the Great Leap Forward was a disaster, no matter what little progress it did make in infrastructure. And despite Mao’s attempt to inspire optimism and pride in his people, they were unable to deliver. Many local officials felt the pressure to hide their failures, falsely reporting success in their sectors instead. Because communes shifted their focus from agricultural to industrial work, food production plummeted, resulting in a famine that caused tens of millions of Chinese citizens to die.
The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976)
As his vision of a truly Sino-Marxist society failed to materialize, Mao doubled down on his efforts to rid China of its impurities and rebuild society anew. He set about starting a new movement in 1966 that would eradicate the “four olds” of China: Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas. The instruments of this eradication were Mao’s Red Guards, students and other youths who devoted themselves wholeheartedly to maintaining his cult of personality. The Red Guards went about Beijing ransacking homes and schools, burning books, and assaulting anyone considered disloyal to Mao.
The remaining years of the Cultural Revolution were marked by a failing economy and intense political paranoia. Simultaneously, Mao’s health waned. Premier Zhou Enlai and other top officials oversaw the daily administration of the country. When Mao died on September 9, 1976, China, the country he spent his life trying to unify, was as divided as ever.
Playwright Bio - The Hundred Flowers Project /
Christopher Chen is an international award-winning playwright whose full-length works have been produced and developed across the United States and abroad, including at the American Conservatory Theater, Asian American Theater Company, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Beijing Fringe, Central Works, Crowded Fire, Cutting Ball Theater, Edinburgh Fringe, Fluid Motion, hotINK Festival, Just Theatre, Lark Play Development Center, Magic Theatre, Playwrights Foundation, Silk Road Theatre Project and Theatre Mu.
Chris is the recipient of the 2013 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and is currently playwright in residence at The Vineyard Theatre. Other honors include: For "The Hundred Flowers Project" the 2012 Glickman Award, the 2012 Rella Lossy Playwriting Award, shortlisted for the 2013 James Tait Black Award, and a nomination for the Steinberg Award; for "Into the Numbers" 2nd Place in the Belarus Free Theater International Competition of Modern Dramaturgy and a Ford Foundation Emerging Writer of Color Grant; finalist for the Jerome Fellowship.
Chris’s plays peddle in the socio-political, the psychological, the absurd and the structurally kaleidoscopic. A Bay Area native, Chris is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley and holds an M.F.A. in Playwriting from S.F. State. He currently lives in San Francisco.
Sponsors - The Hundred Flowers Project /
Opening Night Sponsor: Breakfast, lunch and dinner served seven days a week in the heart of the Loop. Plus, enjoy cocktails and pub food in The Bar Below (open late Mondays - Saturdays). A Chicago tradition since 1967.
Reviews - The Hundred Flowers Project /
There’s a fascinating paradigm shift in the middle of The Hundred Flowers Project, Christopher Chen’s cautionary stage and video thriller. Whether you can believe it or not, the first-act rehearsal of a play about Mao Tse Tung’s propagandistic “Hundred Flowers Project,” “Great Leap Forward,” and Cultural Revolution becomes, in the second act, the sole reality—a self-sustaining play that unleashes its lethal agenda like the computer Hal in 2001. Kinetically enacted by Silk Road Rising in a bold staging by Joanie Schultz, Chen’s ambitious two-act puzzle/protest play conflates two instruments of “persuasion.” Contrasted—but mostly compared—are the Chinese Communists’ bombardment of a cowed populace with false hopes, empty promises and not so empty threats—and our conformity-minded, socially-shaming social media, whose sometimes pernicious influence often masquerades as self-expression and free speech.
-Larry Bommer, Stage and Cinema
A crafty, circular interplay of “play” and “staging of play”—wherein the director of the show becomes increasingly dictatorial and the participants become increasingly divorced from any solid understanding of the line between reality and fiction, between their own will and the will of their leader...what unfolds connects the structures of two different sorts of leadership (political, or artistic), their manipulated inner circles, and the impact on the masses (society as a whole, or the audience). “Flowers” focuses on the risks of speaking one’s mind in a world where your own mind may be perplexingly subsumed by groupthink. The reliance on multimedia through frequent use of video projection, jarring lighting and sound cues, and quick and substantial set changes must pose notable challenges, but to the credit of director Joanie Schultz and crew, you wouldn’t know it from this adept production. The performances are fine, with Melissa Canciller and Karmann Bajuyo excelling at the center of the revolving narrative.
-Raymond Rehayem, Newcity
Silk Road Rising’s latest production is the deeply philosophical The Hundred Flowers Project...The endlessly repeating chain of screens and cameras made a fascinating spectacle, aided by Sarah K. Hughey’s lighting and Peter J. Storms’s sound design. Director Joanie Schultz and technical director Jason Pikscher deserve a lot of credit for getting all these elements moving together...The play contains a lot of ideas about how social media seems to be a vehicle for organic expressions but actually result from manipulation, as in the Facebook mood experiment, or allows people to perpetually revise their persona, as with Snapchat.
-Jacob Davis, ChicagoCritic.com
What does it mean to record your experiences even as you're experiencing them? Are you living a life of pastiche, with the cultural influences and opinions of friends and strangers who are just a click away constantly defining and redefining your own perspectives? Or are you a "narrativist" who seeks to cut a path of orderly storytelling in the chaos of information? There are some undeniably smart and thoughtful insights here into how we craft our viewpoints in the age of instant media. We can "erase" our online presence, but that history is living on somewhere. The multimedia elements, designed by Michael Stanfill, integrate seamlessly with the onstage performances. The beauty of "The Hundred Flowers Project" is that Chen leaves it open-ended enough for you to pluck your own blossoms of insight about messages.
-Kerry Reid, Chicago Tribune
"The Hundred Flowers Project" is a new production that immerses audiences in the creation of a play; layered in process, is something that is tough to capture in words. But the themes and ideas are important, once the mind is wrapped around the opportunity to become lost in what is unfolding in each and every media minute.
-Phil Potempa, Northwest Indiana Times
“The Hundred Flowers Project” is meta-theatre (a play about itself)...a tyrannical but dynamic artistic director, named Mel (Mia Park), tries to write and produce a play about the Cultural Revolution in China. She encourages the members of her cast to contribute their ideas during discussions in real-time, and catalogue them electronically on a shared document database, but it becomes clear that she is interested in possessing sole control and influence over the play, and she suppresses dissent. There is some highly symbolic and stylized but affecting violence, reminiscent of video footage of any number of totalitarian states, both in the play-within-a-play that the theatre ensemble is putting on and in the actual play which we are watching. The blocking of the second act, in which the characters stand, move, and interact with each other in beautifully stylized and graceful ways, helps the audience feel the tension and violence of the piece. Mia Park gives a wonderful performance as Mel: alternatively deranged, brutal, competent and charismatic, and the lovely Melissa Canciller plays Julie and the Journalist with perfect believability and evokes an empathy for her character with a talent that is as rare as her technique is mysterious and invisible. Ultimately, Hundred Flowers succeeds at what theatre is at its very core: writing, acting, directing, and technical work.
-Lawrence Riordan, Around the Town Chicago
It looks at first like Chen is out to satirize the false egalitarianism and faddishness of devised theater. And to some extent he is. The ensemble clearly regard it as revisionist backsliding, for instance, when Julie naively asks why they can't add a character—a journalist, say—for the audience to identify with. Chen isn't satisfied to leave it at that, though. The Hundred Flowers Project opens out tremendously in its second act, to equate the cruel lies, constantly shifting allegiances, and twisted collectivism (dictatorship of the proletarian, indeed!) with the new tyrannies of social media. The ensemble's little theatrical experiment has somehow gone viral to the extent that it's outgrown auditoriums and even stadiums and become a kind of all-pervasive, never-ending, constantly evolving performative organism that defines (and then redefines) both its creators and its audience according to inscrutable algorithms. The Cultural Revolution didn't stop even when Mao declared it over; the ensemble's play won't stop for them, either. It's a brilliant conceit.
-Tony Adler, Chicago Reader
The Hundred Flowers Project under Joanie Schultz’s vigorous direction is a challenging and exciting work, in which a group of young actors working to develop a script about the Chinese Cultural Revolution find themselves engaging in the same destructive group-think as the political figures they seek to portray.Chen has a terrific ear for phony inclusiveness and for dictatorial behavior masquerading as consensus-building, and those political themes give heft and value to what might otherwise have been an exercise in actors’ being cleverly self-regarding. Mia Park shines as the power-drunk director, and she’s ably supported by the rest of the cast. Michael Stanfill’s video and projections design provide the perfect ominous note of nowhere-ness, of ideas and plans and even people disappearing into a rabbit hole of dishonest nonsense. Well worth seeing.
-Kelly Kleiman, Dueling Critics
Reviews - Brahman/i /
Kris Vire, Time Out Chicago
Brahman/i , Aditi Brennan Kapil's fascinating piece, is a layered, insightful consideration of Indian-American cultural identity, gender and colonisation that happens to take the form of a stand-up comedy routine. Using the rhythms and tropes of stand-up, the character recounts a journey to the stage: Asked to choose a gender assignment once old enough, young Brahman went with boy until he was 14 and started developing breasts; in high school, Brahmani decided she'd try on presenting as a girl. Kapil masterfully weaves this personal history with sharp observations about Hindu tradition and the British colonization of India, with anecdotes like Brahman/i's mother's obsession with British-beige interior design motifs slyly suggesting the ways a culture can remain colonized long after the occupation has ended. Presented here in a smart collaboration between Silk Road Rising and About Face Theatre, Brahman/i hinges on a fiery, magnetic central performance by Fawzia Mirza, who pins down just the right kind of dangerous charisma needed to spin this tale. Mirza's accompanied by Damian Conrad as a backup musician whose bass riffs break up Brahman/i's beats, and whose relationship with the title character shows more and more complexity as the evening wears on; there's a bit of the dynamic of Hedwig and the Angry Inch's Hedwig and Yitzhak to these two. Incisive and informative, Brahman/i knows just how to work a room.
Read the entire review online HERE.
Raymond Rehayem, Newcity Stage
This gal’s got some real balls. Is that too blue for you? Sorry, I just couldn't resist such a nice opening. Oh, she’s got one of those too. Lest you think I’m being too irreverent, be advised that the protagonist of Brahman/i is frequently in your face about the uncommonly dual genitalia s/he possesses. Portrayed by actress Fawzia Mirza in a commanding and at times fierce near-solo turn in About Face Theatre/Silk Road Rising’s downtown production, the titular character delights – like any good comedian – in confronting the audience. Like the Hindu concept of Brahman, our hero/ine in this play escapes gender classification. S/he flirts with such designation – and with some of the audience as well – but don’t expect any easy answers. Presented in the guise of stand-up comedy, writer Aditi Brennan Kapil’s entertaining, occasionally provocative show is a treatise on the intersections of personal and cultural boundaries – male/female, colonizer/colonized, history/mythology, science/superstition, nationhood/marriage, adolescence/adulthood – and much of it is wildly successful. To say Mirza is convincing in this persona is an understatement. Mirza is a captivating guide through the myriad interwoven topics Kapil dissects in her amusing and thoughtful script.
Read the entire review online HERE.
Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times
It is a boy or is it a girl? That, as we learn from the title character in Aditi Brennan Kapil’s flourish-filled, identity-swirling play, “Brahman/i” (subtitled “A One-Hijra Stand Up Comedy Show”), was the perfectly natural, yet altogether bedeviling question posed by an aunt when, years earlier, she visited the hospital after the birth. And therein lies the crux of the matter in Kapil’s exceptionally clever (fictional) work that, as its producers — Silk Road Rising and About Face Theatre — have neatly described it, “has been written by a female playwright of mixed Indian and Bulgarian ancestry, told from the perspective of a South Asian American intersex person, and performed by Fawzia Mirza, a South Asian Muslim queer woman.” Mirza, a petite but athletic actress with a sharply sardonic edge, and a persona that can shift from boyish to glam, also happens to give a tour de force performance in the role under Andrew Volkoff’s direction. Throughout, Mirza gets the briefest breaks courtesy of guitarist Damian Conrad, whose crucial spoken line recalls the classic words spoken by Joe E. Brown at the end of Billy Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot”: “Well, nobody’s perfect.”
Read the entire review online HERE.