Golden Thread Productions is celebrating its twentieth anniversary as the first American theater company devoted to works from or about the Middle East. My fall theatergoing has already included Oh My Sweet Land and The Band’s Visit, freshly opened on Broadway to spectacular reviews. Stories based in or about Middle Eastern people and cultures seem to be getting an opportunity to inform and enlighten us in theaters big and small. ReOrient 2017 is a collection of seven plays. The festival features artists and stories from Armenia, India, Iraq, Japan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the U.S.
War on Terror takes place at an airport TSA checkpoint. A comedy, this play demonstrates the perils of air travel when your Arabic speaking mother is cranky. A is for Ali considers a multi-racial couple debating what to name their baby. A Syrian girl and her friend in Dearborn, Michigan, the son of two grieving parents, is a memory play entitled Manar. A double monologue from Osama bin Laden’s wife and the mistress of the President of the United States is the unlikely but wildly effective short, Make No Mistake.
In The Rehearsal, three actors are pretending to work on a British farce but are secretly also working on something more subversive. Shelter is a spoken poetry piece that describes itself as “an audio love poem from Hiroshima to Beirut.” Opening line: “We are the children of bombs of broken glass and shrapnel shadows.” The last, and perhaps best, play of the evening was Thanksgiving at Khodabakhshian’s. New in town, a boss and his wife are invited to the home of his Iranian co-worker.
With the short play format, there is a company of a seven actors playing all the parts. The women (Atosa Babaoff, Naseem Etemad, Jessica Lee Risco and, especially, Bella Warda) shine most brightly. The impressively creative and efficient set design features about a dozen doors, some hanging. They are used for projections, doorways, refrigerators, beds, security screening machines and entranceways depending on the needs of each play. Golden Thread Productions is a company worth seeking out. I thoroughly enjoyed ReOrient which enabled me to listen to voices not everyday familiar to me. In addition, they are going to produce Oh My Sweet Land in various kitchens around the Bay Area this spring. Golden Thread is a needed resource for our theater and our enlightenment.