Home > What's On Stage > Mainstage Season: The Arabian Nights
The Arabian Nights
Written by Mary Zimmerman
Directed by Joel Sass
April 19–28, 2007
Director Joel Sass's statement on "The Arabian Nights":
"I come back to the ARABIAN NIGHTS over and over again because I find the tale of Scheherazade fascinating... It is the story of someone who tells stories to save her life. But I’m really interested in it because at its heart it is a love story." Salman Rushdie
The ARABIAN NIGHTS is a medieval Middle-Eastern literary epic which tells the story of Scheherazade (Shahrzad in Persian), a Sassanid Queen, who must relate a series of stories to her malevolent husband, King Shahryar, to delay her execution. The stories are told over a period of one thousand and one nights, and every night she ends the story with a suspenseful situation, forcing the King to keep her alive for another day. The individual stories were created over many centuries, by many people and in many styles, and they have become famous in their own right.
Unfortunately, the ARABIAN NIGHTS has suffered at the hands of earlier English translators - one thinks particularly of Richard Burton's version in the 1800s', which obscured much that is admirable in the NIGHTS by over-emphasizing matters of sex and indulging a Victorian enthusiasm for 'Oriental exotica.'
Which is not to say the original NIGHTS is lacking in sensuality, violence, bawdy humor and fantasy. Excellent newer translations by Husain Haddawy and Muhsin Mahdi (among others) return the NIGHTS to a more authentic voice, while continuing to reveal its unique tapestry of high and low humor, crowd-pleasing maqamat (turbulent tales of adventure), proverbs in folkloric form, and the tradition of courtly love poetry.
Although the ARABIAN NIGHTS is primarily secular in the matters it treats, and cannot be said to be especially religious, nor its stories representative of Islam as practiced either now or in the past, nonetheless, some of the finest and most noble sentiments in Islam - fairness, compassion, a love of learning, and forgiveness - shine in the actions of the characters. Mary Zimmerman's sensitive adaptation emphasizes this, with particular attention paid to the representation of the feminine, and the many races, ethnicities and cultures (India, China, Africa and Persia) that participated in the creation of the NIGHTS.
As the director and project leader, I feel it is particularly desirable to do this piece now, when the part of the world where the NIGHTS originated is threatened by such turmoil. The ARABIAN NIGHTS project invites us to explore a treasury of Arabic literary forms and an encyclopedia of human experience and imagination, while developing a deeper understanding of and appreciation for ensemble creation as a philosophical stance and as a practical way of making art.
4.19 at 7:30pm
4.20 at 8pm
4.21 at 8pm
4.22 at 2pm
4.26 at 7:30pm SOLD OUT
4.27 at 8pm SOLD OUT
4.28 at 8pm SOLD OUT
Opening Night Post-Show Reception: Thursday, April 19th
ASL Interpreted: Saturday, April 28th