Scenic Design by Jacqueline and Richard Penrod
Lighting Design by Lee Keenan
Costume Design by Mara Blumenfeld
Original music by Kevin O’Donnell
Sound Design by Joshua Horvath

FeaturingKevin Douglas and Philip R. Smith, Joe Dempsey, Ravi Batista, Anish Jethmalani, Ericka Ratcliff, Nick Sandys and Rom Barkhordar.
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Our Enemies by Yussef El Guindi
Director | Patrizia Acerra
Scenic Design | Lee Keenan
Costume Design | Christine Pascual
Lighting Design | Mac Vaughey
Sound Design & Original Music | Rob Steel
Props Design | Daniel Katz

Featuring | Kareem Bandealy, Andrew Navarrom, Don Bender, James Elly, Susie Griffith, Monica Lopez, Vincent P. Mahler<

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The Attempters by Shawn Pfautsch
Director | Marika Mashburn
Scenic Designer | Collette Pollard
Costume Designer | Debbie Baer
Lighting Designer | Lee Keenan
Music Director | Andy Wagner
Sound Designer | Rick Sims
Props Designer | Michelle Warner
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By Chris Jones | Theater critic
March 4, 2008

At the top of Yussef El Guindi’s new play, we’re taken to a TV studio—it looks a lot like Fox News—where an iconoclastic host is about to interview the Arab-born author of “Jihad 101.” It’s a book that panders to the prejudices of conservative hosts who view all Arab cultures as nothing more than petri dishes for terrorism.

Oh no, I thought. Most plays don’t do either cable news or conservative authors well—the temptations of caricature prove too great. And for about five minutes, it feels like we’re about to get one of those earnest, liberal, grant-friendly and (if all we’re being is honest) deadly boring plays where the American mass media is vilified (like that’s hard) and a misguided character spends two hours discovering the spiritual importance of from whence he came.

El Guindi delivers no such thing. On the contrary, this world premiere of “Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and Combat” reveals an exceedingly smart, sophisticated and compelling exploration of Arab-American identity and the opportunities as well as the perils of assimilation. Not only does El Guindi probe the dilemma of being Arab in a culture with little understanding of the Middle East, he’s also willing to explore the demonstrable personal benefits of leaving the past behind in America.

To its great credit, this play continuously undercuts its own identity. El Guindi stares in the face—his own face—what it means to be an out-front Arab-American writer benefiting from the incendiary mix of fear, curiosity, guilt and self-justification with which the American media approach all things Arab.

Should one do one’s earnest work at serious little Chicago theaters—like, say, the Silk Road Theatre Project?

Or should one give Big Media what they want—personal “beyond the burqa” memoirs starting in escape from a generically repressive Arab culture and ending in an appearance on “Oprah,” wearing designer clothes?

The central character of aspiring author Noor (Monica Lopez) is faced with a similar dilemma here. Smelling a compelling personal story, New York publishers want her far more than her fiction. Meanwhile, two men in Noor’s life (both expertly acted here) represent polarities.

Gamal (Kareem Bandealy) is an angry but mostly ineffectual radical. Mohsen (Andrew Navarro) is a highly successful but dangerous assimilationist. Both get their say. Both fight for Noor’s body and soul.

Although it moves well and features a dazzling little visual design by Lee Keenan and Mike Tutaj, Patrizia Lombardi Acerra’s production isn’t perfect—it sometimes flirts with archetype, there is some weird physicality, and the intensely credible focus achieved by the fine actors in the central love triangle doesn’t fully extend beyond. Toward the end, the play could use a trim, for speechifying dominates.

But if you’re interested in smart new plays, don’t miss this one. It’s the best piece by the hugely talented El Guindi that I’ve seen. And it’s further evidence that Silk Road has real guts behind its genial facade.

cjones5@tribune.com

“Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and Combat”

When: Through March 30

Where: Silk Road Theatre Project, 77 W. Washington St., Chicago

Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes

Tickets: $28-$32

Burial at Thebes adapted from Sophocles Antigone by Seamus Heaney
Director | Sarah Gabel
Scenic & Costume Designer | Jacqueline Firkins
Lighting Designer | Lee Keenan
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Production Design | Lee Keenan, Meghan Raham, and Blake Montgomery
Costume Design | Meghan Raham
Lighting design | Lee Keenan
Sound Design | Kevin O’Donnell
Assistant Lighting Designer | Ryan Williams

Performed and Created | David Amaral, Eddie Bennett, Sarah Goeden, Fannie Hungerford, Chelsea Keenan, and Daiva Olson.

I’m really proud of this show, through light, paint, and a heroic hour worth of hair and make-up each night on the part of the cast, we pulled off a compelling black and white look.
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What a joy this was to light, the whole production is in greyscale, right down to skin and hair [thanks to the actors for their laborious preshow makeup job]. It is is dark,shadowy , high contrast, sexy, its Noir. And the show is funny, it comes from a clown aesthetic and plays at the noir style. It runs Fri-Sun till Nov 4th.

Reviews:

New City Chicago

“…in terms of aesthetics, Montgomery knows what he is doing. Lee Keenan’s lighting design is crucial–the long, husky shadows; the muted glow creeping through the slats of an unseen window blind, tattooing the wall. (Keenan also designed[actually I collaborated with Blake and Megan on] the set, a soaring space defined by pivoting walls that suggests the slipperiness of truth as it reveals itself in film noir.) ” - Nina Metz
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Chicago Reader

“Director Blake Montgomery and his six performers, who collaborated on this 75-minute piece, have distilled film noir to its essence. Ingeniously lit and often wryly funny it has a sort of genre urplot…” - Laura Molzah

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Chicago Tribune

“…The Building Stage’s expansive loft space is dark and atmospheric and filled with the shadows of window blinds. It does indeed rain. Attractive women lurk in the shadows. Guys with the right kind of hat and crooked tie occupy the attentions of our iris. And the talented sound-designer Kevin O’Donnell has come up with a score that manages to be every film noir you ever saw, distilled. In the first few minutes, it all feels like a very cool idea at one of Chicago’s newer and more promising creative outposts in the noir-appropriate West Loop…”

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The Centerstage Review, by Alicia Eler.
Wednesday Oct 03, 2007

In the dark, crime-ridden world of a 1940s film noir, unthinkable dramas full of mystery and intrigue play out daily. Detectives with brooding stares, lit cigarettes and voice-overs tell the audience what’s going on inside their heads, how a femme fatale-like lady is driving them crazy or how the rain hits the window panes of their low-lit office. In Blake Montgomery’s latest masterpiece, “Noir,” he brings famous lines from a bevy of notable film noirs, including “The Maltese Falcon,” “Gilda,” “Double Indemnity,” “The Big Sleep” and “Lady from Shanghai,” and crafts them into one play that incorporates the quintessential film noir detective and the woman who tempts him into evil.

Unlike more-straightforward, story-telling theatre, “Noir” does not give it to viewers quite so easily. Using two detectives instead of one and four femme fatales, Noir masterfully compresses many film noirs into one during the 75-minute production. The Building Stage differentiates itself from other theatre in the way that the show unravels: No performance is ever the same. Instead, each show is in the “building stages” and evolves during the evening.

Playing on every stylistic film noir element, from the high-contrast shadows to the detective’s ’40s-style desk to the lone streetlight on the dark street outside, Montgomery makes the entire theatre feel like a vintage film set. Each character wears whiteface; detectives brood, keeping up their hard-boiled façade, and the femme fatales play up their alluring characters. Though every performance differs from the previous one, theatergoers with a taste for this American cinema genre will by wowed by Montgomery’s creative interpretations and the cast’s strong grasp of this overly dramatized style of acting.
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The Creative Team

conceived and directed by
Blake Montgomery

created and performed by
David Amaral, Eddie Bennett, Sarah Goeden, Fannie Hungerford, Chelsea Keenan, and Daiva Olson.

costume design
Meghan Raham

lighting design
Lee Keenan

sound design
Kevin O’Donnell

production design
Lee Keenan, Meghan Raham, and Blake Montgomery

stage management
Sheena L. Young

assistant lighting designer
Ryan Williams

I’m really proud of this show. I designed the set and the projections on this our latest Silk Road Theatre Project: Shishir Kurup’s Merchant On Venice. The “On” is not a typo, this is a modern adaptation set on West LA’s Venice Blvd with Hindus and Muslims rather than Christian’s and Jews, its a perfect Silk Road show. Reviews have been phenomenal as you can see below. It runs through November 4th, don’t miss it.

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chicagotribune.com
THEATER REVIEW
Bold ‘Merchant’ melds Bard, Bollywood
By Chris Jones

Tribune theater critic

October 8, 2007

Shylock becomes an alienated Muslim trapped in a Southern Californian world of immigrant, movie-loving Hindus. Jessica runs away to Hollywood. To snag Portia’s hand in marriage, suitors have to pick the right DVD. And that famous pound of flesh? In Shishir Kurup’s remarkable polycultural deconstruction of William Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” the owner of the Money Store wants to make his extraction from a most delicate part of the male anatomy.

This hip-hop influenced script somehow fuses references to Jim Morrison, Helen of Troy, Vladimir Nabokov, Leif Garrett (!) and Freddie Mercury, even as it translates events in the troubled original with astonishing precision. And everyone still speaks in blank verse.

I’ve no idea why “Merchant on Venice,” which apparently was workshopped and chatted about extensively at big theaters on both coasts, landed for a world premiere at the still-emerging Silk Road Theatre Company, which operates in a 100-seat theater in Chicago’s Loop. Actually, I do have some idea. It’s a big, new, risky, rambunctious show set in the U.S. South Asian community and thus out of the classical mainstream.

Silk Road has been promising us new work of international repute. In this case, they have most assuredly delivered. This is a show that will have an extensive international life. If Kurup could somehow get his script, say, in the hands of the right person at the Royal Shakespeare Company, this play might actually help that company better reflect the world in which they (and Shakespeare) now operate.

I found this “Merchant” 10 times as funny, smart and intellectually stimulating as “The Bomb-itty of Errors,” which it slightly resembles. And that has been a hit across the country. For sure, this piece is a must-see for anyone who follows progressive approaches to Shakespeare. And if you have a teenager studying this difficult play, a trip to see Kurup’s eye-popping version will have their eyes bulging out of their sockets.

But their heads will still be in the original Shakespearean themes — racial tolerance, personal bitterness, the way brutality begets brutality. That’s why this piece is so good. It’s a funny, lively show written with sharp satirical wit. It even contains a huge musical parody of the Bollywood gestalt. But it’s no mere spoof.

Kurup’s adaptation — appropriation is a better word — of Shakespeare’s most troubling story is both uncannily accurate and transformative.

Stuart Carden’s very lively production is a new high for Silk Road. Anchored by the complex Anish Jethmalani as Sharuk, the piece also features a very funny performance from Tariq Vasudeva and rich, punky work from the youthful likes of Sadieh Rifai, Amira Sabbagh and, especially, Pranidhi Varshney as Portia, er, Pushpa.

I’d argue the piece could lose 10 minutes from its second act. And you have to be willing to watch many competing aesthetic styles all at once. But given the free-wheeling style, that’s not overly bothersome. This is a superb piece of passionate, irreverent, insightful writing.

“He hates me for what I am,” says this Sharuk, raging within, “a rival businessman not of his faith.” On such turns a wider world than Shakespeare did imagine.

cjones5@tribune.com

“The Merchant on Venice”
Where: Silk Road Theatre Project, 77 W. Washington St.

When: Through Nov. 4

Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes

Tickets: $28-33 at 888-745-5849
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Worldly Hindus take on a strict Muslim
THEATER REVIEW | Take another look at the Bard’s ‘Merchant’
October 1, 2007

BY HEDY WEISS Theater Critic

Note to New York’s Public Theater, producer of Shakespeare in Central Park: Send a scout to see the Silk Road Theatre Project’s hip, funny, ingeniously reconfigured world premiere of “Merchant on Venice,” Shishir Kurup’s reinvention of Shakespeare’s most controversial play. Stage this production at the outdoor Delacorte Theater and you can bet half the Indian immigrant population of Queens will be lined up for seats, with the Muslims of Brooklyn right behind them.

And you thought this was a story of Renaissance-era Venice, where rich Christian businessmen crassly used, abused and finally destroyed the Jew who lived among them. Think again. Kurup (born in India, raised in Kenya, a longtime transplant to the United States), has a Salman Rushdie-like fluency in cross-cultural, pop-cultural hijinks and a flair for highly ornamented, wildly comical linguistic flights. And in updating his “Merchant” to contemporary Venice, Calif. — where wealthy, worldly Hindus face off against a prosperous, ultra-conservative Muslim — he has heightened the controversy for our times and conjured a feast of behavioral and musical correspondences that do Shakespeare proud.

Director Stuart Carden’s exceptionally buoyant, Bollywood-infused production — with an ethnic cast that clearly thrives on this material — is ambitious and delicious on many levels.

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Chicago Reader
MERCHANT ON VENICE Shishir Kurup doesn’t merely update the Elizabethan vernacular (he keeps the iambs) in his bold, smart, sardonic reinvention of one of Shakespeare’s most troubling plays. He also skillfully weaves in post-9/11 paranoia about “the other” as well as the prejudices of competing immigrant groups on LA’s Venice Boulevard. Here Sharuk/Shylock (a stunning Anish Jethmalani) is a Muslim mercilessly derided by Hindu Devendra/Antonio and his friends. This minority-on-minority conflict creates layers of cultural dissonance both intriguing (Sharuk’s daughter runs off to be a punk singer) and disturbing (Pushpa/Portia sneeringly dismisses a marriage proposal from a darker-skinned fellow Indian). Stuart Carden’s spirited world-premiere staging for Silk Road Theatre Project highlights equally the script’s sinister undertones and its giddy polyglot mix of traditional and pop-culture references. –

Kerry Reid
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From Barbara Vitello @ Daily Herald

” A sparkling production directed by Stuart Carden”

“It’s Kavita (Jessica) who finally stops the madness with an eloquent plea for tolerance and forgiveness that recognizes Hindu complicity in perpetuating prejudice and hatred (something Shakespeare’s Christians never admit). It’s in that speech - a quiet but powerful reminder that we can preserve our humanity if we wish to - that Kurup solves Shakespeare’s problem.”
“This show delights……Bravo.”
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Merchant on Venice by Shishir Kurup
Director | Stuart Carden
Scenic Design | Lee Keenan
Costume Design | Carol Blanchard
Lighting Design | Rebecca Barrett
Sound Design & Original Music | Rob Steel
Props Design | Dan Pellant

Featuring | Kamal Hans, Madrid St. Angelo, Vincent Mahler, Andy Nagraj, Gerardo Cardenas, Marvin Quihada, Pranidhi Varshney, Amira Sabbagh, Anish Jethmalani, Tariq Vasudeva, Sadieh Rifai
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