Harem-Raising Tales

MICHAEL DAVIS PHOTO

No magic lamp required: Cast members revel amid the colorful costumes and sets of SU Drama’s Arabian Nights.

The first thing that sets Zimmerman
apart from the current generation is her rooting in myth, the language
of the unconscious mind. Conventional wisdom has it that myth is more
suitable to the movies, from King Kong to Lord of the Rings and too
hard to handle by a live actor in greasepaint. Zimmerman responds with
The Metamorphoses, The Agonautika and The Odyssey. Not all her myths
are ancient: Two other shows are The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and
Eleven Rooms of Proust. Dealing with da Vinci and Proust requires a
wider definition of “myth,” of course, but in all instances the appeal
of her stage works is primal and universal. She tends to favor short,
interlocking narratives that make variations on common themes, from
greed through rage to tranquility. Her Arabian Nights is echt Zimmerman
and dates from the early 1990s.

Her major
liability may already be apparent: Too much narrative on stage is a
weakness when audiences crave conflict and rising action. You can’t
have the Arabian Nights without Scheherazade’s narrative voice linking
the stories together. Zimmerman knows this. She fills the stage with
more action than the eye can follow. The show is part circus with
miming evocations of camels and boats. Sixteen players take on 91 roles
without regard to gender or physical type. Arielle Lever, for example,
moves quickly from being Poor Man to being Old Woman. Fix your eye on
one player for two minutes, and you find that he (maybe she) has
followed individual steps shared by no one else in the cast and is “on”
every moment, reacting empathically when listening in a chorus.

Given
how many cast members Zimmerman calls for, her shows are too expensive
for many League of Resident Theaters like Syracuse Stage and are often
performed by college companies. Younger performers, however, bring
another advantage: Arabian Nights is a gymnastic workout in which half
the players are still doing cartwheels and handstands 2½ hours after
the opening curtain.

Everyone knows
something of the framing tale of Arabian Nights going in. A powerful
ruler in Baghdad has been murdering his wives and is looking for an
innocent virgin. Here he is called Shahryar (Steven Hosking), but if
you first learned these stories in a children’s version, he was called
“the Sultan.” Bowdlerized children’s versions make him a generic male
chauvinist pig, but here he is a tormented cuckold, an important
difference. He’s not just an insomniac seeking diversion, he’s looking
for the truth. Scheherazade (Jackie Ganz) is understandably reluctant
to find herself a bride. Her emotions are partially hidden as her face
is marked with henna, as are those of all the women in the cast. Yet
she gains self-assurance as she speaks.

Her
tales are indeed enthralling, but the bulk will not be familiar to most
theatergoers. Missing are the three best-known stories, Aladdin, Sinbad
and Ali Baba, because, as it turns out, they were not in the original
Thousand and One Nights but were interpolated by European translators.
In one of the first stories, a desert anticipation of Eugene Onegin, a
proud, self-involved merchant cruelly spurns the love of an admiring
woman in his callow youth. Hurt, she destroys him, but later she helps
to resurrect him. Named Perfect Love (Lulu Fogarty), her outward
comeliness reflects her inner beauty.

The
Rabelaisian tale of the Jester (Meredith Perryman) redefines the barely
perceptible lines between lust and love. First there is the Jester’s
monumentally promiscuous wife (Hilary Curwen), who becomes the entryway
into stories from each of her lovers, like the Pastry cook (Jessica
Mazo), the Butcher (Danielle von Gal) and the Clarinetist (Justin
Conte). They must spin out their own tales to win clemency from the
Jester’s outraged patron, the ruler of Baghdad, Harun al-Rashid
(Dominique Stasiulis), a figure cited for his virtue throughout Arabian
Nights.

Speaking of Baghdad, Zimmerman’s
text frequently cites the name Iraq, which did not exist in the ancient
world, and many of her lines mention place names often in the news
since the beginning of the Bush-Cheney misadventure nearly five years
ago. They foreshadow her conclusion, ushered in with the sounds of air
raid sirens. Her last line reads, “And the nights over Baghdad were
white; and the lights over Baghdad were why.”

SU
Drama’s mischievous playbill policy lists the 91 roles after players’
names, rather than in sequence or by scene, thus making it difficult to
assign acting credit where it is due. Jackie Ganz and Steven Hosking,
both playing double roles, always make their presences known, even when
standing at the side. Hosking, while appropriately threatening, gives
us a Shahryar with emotional depth. Dominique Stasiulis, Lulu Fogarty,
Danielle von Gal and Jessica Mazo all command attention, no matter who
they’re supposed to be.

Names easier to
credit are those who put this magnificent production together: W. Haley
Ho’s arched sets, evocative but open; Megan Moriarty’s costumes that
give us the Middle East without harem pants or bellybutton cliches;
Erin M. Ballantine’s lush sound design; and Alok Wadhwani’s
ever-changing lighting. The two choreographers are Andrea Leigh-Smith
from Halifax and Rohan Sheth from Pittsburgh; who knows where one’s
work ends another’s begins? Finally, there’s director Stephen Cross,
founder and artistic director of Halifax’s Irondale Ensemble Project
Canada. Without his vision we might never have seen Mary Zimmerman. q

This production runs through Sunday, Feb. 24. See Times Table for information.