Jason Grote's "1001" @ UCSD, Georgetown & in Print

Both Jason Grote's 1001 and Mary Zimmerman's stage version of the Nights are enjoying extensions at the various US theaters they have been playing at.

Jason Grote's play, which I was fortunate enough to both read pre-publication and see here at UCSD last year, is a humorous, fast-paced post-post-pre-modernistic take on the Nights which I found compelling and refreshing. One of the few "versions" of the Nights to go for what Pasolini calls the "flower" of the Nights, its essence vs. its literal (ultimately false) self.

Grote places the settings of the Nights in contemporary and past settings, meshing time in such a concatenated fashion that you are never really sure exactly what year it is. The stories from the Nights include the frame story and suggestions to several others but also veer off into contemporary US (and "Arab") political and cultural landscapes including 9/11 with a guest spot by Osama bin Laden and a problematic college love affair between a Jewish student from New York and a Palestinian student with roots in Kuwait.

The UCSD version I saw featured a great looking set in a small (100-person) space (see the label "grote" on this blog for more info about the production) and also some great music played by a visible "club" type of DJ standing on some scaffolding.

The scaffolding allowed for a dual level effect which worked well in certain scenes in which the stories meshed or a tower or apartment building was needed and the various entrances and exits of the theater allowed for seamless scene changes during brief blackouts. I also enjoyed the smallness of the theater, it's always a bit surprising to watch a play because of the immediacy of the actors to your own physical body and both the UCSD production and Grote's writing utilize the effect of being an actual participant in the play itself (without anyone calling on you to dance or anything chessy like that). There was even smoking! Is the theater the last place people can smoke cigarettes anymore?

All in all it was and is a great reproduction of the key elements of the Nights.

If you haven't you should buy a copy of the play affordable and available from the very well known theater publisher Samuel French here: http://www.samuelfrench.com/store/product_info.php/products_id/7271.

The latest incarnation of 1001 is still running at The Rorschach Theatre in Washington DC. (http://www.rorschachtheatre.com/default.aspx?webpage=1001)

and they made a cool preview/trailer for it available on youtube:



Here's an interview with the director Randy Baker as well:

This Week: Jason Grote's 1001 at UCSD

1001

Directed by Kim Rubinstein

tickets and more information at:

http://theatre.ucsd.edu/season/1001/

A potent, passionate, funny, kaleidoscopic re-imagining of the classic Arabian Nights. Nationally celebrated playwright Jason Grote's politically charged theatrical maze explores current Middle Eastern tensions as it shifts back and forth and through mythic Arabia and modern-day New York City.

About the author:

Jason Grote's plays include 1001 (Denver Center world premiere, Page 73, Theater @ Boston Court, Contemporary American Theater Festival, Mixed Blood), Box Americana, Darwin's Challenge, Hamilton Township (Salvage Vanguard Theater world premiere; upcoming, Soho Rep), Maria/Stuart (Woolly Mammoth Theater world premiere; upcoming, Theater Schmeater), and This Storm Is What We Call Progress (Rorschach Theater world premiere). He is currently working on the screenplay for What We Got: DJ Spooky's Quest for the Commons and co-hosting The Acousmatic Radio Theater Hour on WFMU (91.1FM in NY/NJ, around the world at wfmu.org).

He has been published by Samuel French, Playscripts Inc., and in The Back Stage Book of New American Short Plays 2005 (edited by Craig Lucas), and his draft manuscripts are archived at the Lincoln Center/Billy Rose branch of the NYPL. He has received commissions from ACT (Seattle), Clubbed Thumb, The Denver Center, Ensemble Studio Theater, The Keen Company, and The Working Theater. Honors include an Ovation Award from The Denver Post; the P73 Fellowship; nominations for The Pushcart Prize, The Kesselring Prize, and The Weissberger Award; and "Best New Play" (for 1001) from Denver's alternative weekly, Westword. 1001 was also included in critics' year-end top ten lists in Time Out New York, The Rocky Mountain News, and The Boulder Daily Camera, and nominated for "Best Production of 2008" by L.A. Weekly. He is a member of PEN, New Dramatists, and Soho Rep's Artist Advisory Committee, and a contributor to Comedy Central's "Indecision 2008" blog. Visit him at jasongrote.com.

About the Director:

Prior to UCSD, Kim Rubinstein was the Associate Artistic Director of the Long Wharf Theatre where she directed Guys and Dolls, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Private Lives, Santaland Diaries and The Cocktail Hour. Other recent directing credits include The American Plan for The Old Globe, The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow for Portland Center Stage and San Jose Repertory Theatre, and Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet for Shakespeare Santa Cruz. Some other directing credits: Romeo and Juliet, MacBeth and Julius Caesar (Chicago Shakespeare Theatre), The American Plan and Eloise and Ray (Roadworks Productions), Pan and Boone (Running With Scissors), Love’s Labour’s Lost (Next Theatre), Not I, (Bucket O’Beckett Festival), Act without Words I, Not I, Play, Come and Go, Baby With the Bathwater and Sarita (Berkshire Theatre Festival). Here at UCSD she directed Balm in Gilead and 1001. Kim was the Associate and Tour Director of the national tour of Angels in America.


Her other teaching credits include ten years on the acting faculty at Northwestern University, Brown/Trinity Consortium, Wesleyan University, University of Chicago, Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, Teatro degli Stracci, and an ongoing gig with the professional School at Steppenwolf.


Ms. Rubinstein is a recipient of the TCG/NEA directing fellowship and was nominated for the Alan Schneider Directing Award, among other directing and teaching awards. Active in the development of new plays, she has done readings and workshops at places like New Dramatists and the Long Wharf.

cast:

Rebecca Lawrence – A
Anne Stella – B
Hugo Medina – C
Zoe Chao – D
Daniel Rubiano – E
Adam Arian – F
Naqiya Ebrahim – Dancer
Justin Gines – Dancer

creative:

Director - Kim Rubinstein
Production Stage Manager - Deirdre Rose Holland
Scenic Designer - Rob Tintoc
Costume Designer - Allison Crutchfield
Lighting Designer - Stephen Siercks
Sound Designer - Toby Jaguar Algya
Choreographer - Rebecca Salzar
Asst Director - Jeffrey Wienckowski
Asst Stage Manager - Cate O’Brien
Asst Scenic Designer - Max Lee
Asst Costume Designer - Shamira Turner
Asst Lighting Designer - Sarah Kranz
Dramaturg - Rana Salimi-Ghezelbash
Voice & Dialect Coach - Eva Barnes
Production Assistant - Tiffany Fontaine

performances:

Thu, Feb. 26 at 7:00pm PREVIEW
Fri, Feb. 27, 8:00 pm OPENING
Sat, Feb 28, 8:00 pm
Wed, Mar 4, 8:00 pm
Thu, Mar 5, 8:00 pm
Fri, Mar 6, 8:00 pm
Sat, Mar 7, 2:00 pm MATINEE
Sat, Mar 7, 8:00 pm CLOSING


Located at:Mandell Weiss Forum STUDIO

Limited Seating and No Late Seating

Parking Passes Required: Monday through Friday. Weeknight passes are $2 per vehicle from the vending machines located in the UC San Diego Theatre District/La Jolla Playhouse parking lots and entry display case. Please remember your parking space number. You will need it to purchase your parking pass.

Note: Machines take all major credit cards except Discover and when paying with cash you must use exact change, NO CHANGE GIVEN.

Parking Passes Not Required: Saturdays and Sundays

http://theatre.ucsd.edu/places/parking.html

Cars without permits are subject to ticketing by UCSD Campus Police. The Theatre & Dance Department does not have the authority to waive and cannot pay parking tickets.

General Admission: $20
UCSD Faculty/Staff and Seniors (over 62): $12
UCSD Students/UCSD Alumni Association (with ID): $10
*Preview performance on Thursday, Feb. 26th at 7:00pm is offered at the reduced ticket prices of $15/$10/$8

Advance tickets for this production are available Monday-Friday, noon to 6 pm by calling the Box Office at 858.534.4574 or in person at the Theatre District’s Central Box Office at the Sheila & Hughes Potiker Theatre.

At-the-Door tickets, if available, can be purchased one hour before show time at the performing theatre’s box office at Mandell Weiss Forum STUDIO

More Reviews of Jason Grote's Play

Here is an additional collection of reviews of the recent Jason Grote play "1001," soon to be released in print by publisher Samuel French:

LA Weekly:
http://www.laweekly.com/2008-05-22/stage/jason-grote-and-his-arabian-nights/

Variety:
http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117932661.html?categoryid=33&cs=1

The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/10/AR2007071002012_2.html

Time Out NY:
http://www.timeout.com/newyork/articles/theater/23992/1001

The Village Voice:
http://www.villagevoice.com/2007-10-30/theater/jason-grote-adapts-the-arabian-nights-his-own-way/

WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show:
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/2008/11/26/segments/116706

The Boston Globe:
http://boston.com/news/globe/ideas/brainiac/2007/06/scheherazade_sc.html

Grote's "1001"

Yet another Nights based play in the US, this one from Minnesota. Something in the air?

http://www.startribune.com/

OnStage: Love, impossible
The cultural mash-up "1001" takes center stage at Mixed Blood Theatre.

By ROHAN PRESTON, Star Tribune

Last update: November 1, 2008 - 4:38 PM

In a new show at Mixed Blood, playwright Jason Grote offers a variation on a theme that often gets played out onstage, onscreen and on vacation in some of our personal lives: After the fire has burned out of their relationship, a loveless couple take a trip to some exotic locale. Amid the local color, fauna and spices, they reignite their flame.

Grote started writing "1001" from this clichéd basis, but then gave it a twist. In his version, the couple -- one Jewish and the other Palestinian -- face such intractable differences that a jaunt to Mexico will not be enough. Instead, they must journey to the realm of the imagination. The playwright sets the action in the magic-carpet world of "One Thousand and One Arabian Nights."

Will this super-exotic background help them to get over their relationship difficulties?

Twin Cities audiences will find out starting Thursday when Grote's "1001" previews at Mixed Blood Theatre. The play is a cultural mash-up that reinterprets some of the stories in "Arabian Nights" through a prism of contemporary American culture. It combines elements of Aladdin and Sinbad with Monty Python-esque slapstick and lush language that has been likened to that of Jorge Luis Borges.

The play also is infused with experimental hip-hop and electronica music as well as pop-cultural references to Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and Michael Jackson's "Thriller." And the show's cast of characters includes Osama bin Laden, famed lawyer Alan Dershowitz and 19th-century writer Gustave Flaubert.

A reviewer for the Rocky Mountain News called last year's Denver premiere "a riot of ideas, experiences and influences."

"A play has to be a vehicle for something bigger than itself," Grote said Monday by phone from New York City. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at New Jersey's Rutgers University. "If it's just a love story, I could just watch a soap opera. It has to have some big ideas, expressed in a personal way, and some real spectacle to draw you in."

Brimming with big ideas

And just what are the big ideas in "1001"? Grote, a New Jersey native who was educated at New York University, explained that when he began writing the work in 2004 during the heated electoral season, the war in Iraq was hotter than it is now. "It was dangerous to come out and say anything that could smell like a critique, like treason," he said.

Still, his goal was to find a way to critique and to show up ideas that he said ran through both personal and political developments. "It was a time when we were into this kind of xenophobic panic about Islam and Arabs -- a panic that's playing itself out in this political season. We have seen it even now, the suggestion that one presidential candidate is secretly a Muslim, as if there's something inherently wrong with that," he said. "But that kind of suspicion and misunderstanding ties deeply into the literary and philosophical history of Europe, which is all about misunderstanding Asia."

Still, as he wrote, Grote did not want to simply preach "to the liberal choir." So he turned the narrative of the play again, giving personal, bodily form to some questions.

"To some degree, it's an understandable human trait that we misperceive some things," he continued. "In a relationship, there's always a gap between what we expect someone to be and what they turn out to be. It happens at the macro, geopolitical level, as well, like in Iraq. I wanted to ask, by way of this play, if a lot of this clash-of-civilization narrative -- if these global misunderstandings were not, to some degree, inevitable."

Ultimately, as much as he likes to wrestle with historical and political ideas, he also likes to be entertained in the theater, Grote said. So he crafted "1001" to be a kaleidoscopic spectacle. "We try to make it enjoyable."

1001

Who: By Jason Grote. Directed by Sarah Rasmussen.

When: Previews 7:30 p.m. Thu. Opens 7:30 p.m. Fri.-Sat., 3 p.m. next Sun. Ends Nov. 23.

Where: Mixed Blood Theatre, 1501 S. 4th St., Mpls.

Tickets: $11-$30. 612-338-6131. www.mixedblood.com.