Jan 18, 2008

Provocative one-acts 'ReOrient' Bay

By John Angell Grant / Theater Reviewer

For eight years, Bay Area theater company Golden Thread has been producing an annual one-act play festival dealing with life in the Middle East. The event is called "ReOrient." This year's offering, featuring five new short plays, is running at the Magic Theater in San Francisco.

In the opening one-act, "22 Minutes Remaining," a Lebanese woman gets a phone call from an Israeli army lieutenant whose job is to alert civilians a few minutes before bombing raids begin, so that they can evacuate their residences. The two characters end up getting involved in each other's lives over the phone as they conflict in the emergency situation. There is even humor, as both are smokers trying to resist smoking.

The story line is an emotionally powerful one. "22 Minutes Remaining" might have been stronger without the Lebanese woman's long account, late in the play, of her emerging adulthood through the 1960s and beyond. Similarly, the soldier has a final political speculation that seemed a repetitious weight. All their important conversation had already taken place.

In other words, less personal back story and less political analysis might have been more. Nonetheless, "22 Minutes Remaining" is a strong piece.

One big highlight of the evening is the thoughtful and humorous "The Monologist Suffers Her Monologue." Here a Palestinian woman (Sara Razavi) approaches a stand-up microphone, as if in a comedy club on open mike night, and proceeds to do her monologue for the audience. She claims that she hates monologues, but that she is stuck doing one because Palestine is not a play, but a monologue. What ensues is a clever piece about identity and existence.

Says the woman about herself and her country, "If you can't have a free and easy dialogue with others, you become a monologue." Razavi turns in a strong, humorous and moving performance.

Playwright Laura Shamas' "Pistachio Stories" is another of the evening's highlights. Here, a young American (the talented Garth Petal) worries that he's being followed by a red van because he watches Al-Jazeera news on television.

Interwoven with his story is his friend's fear that two bags of pistachio nuts that she received from Syria are a secret message from terrorists.

With humor, suspense and thoughtfulness, this play effectively lays out a story of paranoia and persecution in a world of political fear. "Pistachio Stories" is a solid script, well directed by Mark Routhier, with strong performances from its three actors (Petal, Razavi and Danielle Levin).

Oddly, the evening's play with the biggest fanfare is one of the weakest. "Between This Breath and You," by MacArthur Fellowship recipient Naomi Wallace, comes across more as a concept for a play than a flesh-and-blood story.

In this offering, an older Arab man (Julian Lopez-Morillas) slips into a private Israeli hospital to confront first a janitor, and then a nursing assistant. By the end of the story, lots of unexpected family twists and turns have emerged cleverly with a few "aha" moments.

It's just that the play seems to be more about its structural unfolding than about its characters. The janitor, who dominates the first half, ends up feeling irrelevant, despite his parallels to an offstage character.

The fifth one-act, "I Sell Souls," is a short performance art piece choreographed to a poem by Iranian Nobel Prize nominee Simin Behbehani. The staging has some strong visual images, such as the silhouette of a barefoot man in a derby and suit fanning a wad of dollars.

The poem looks at the conflict between spiritual and material forces in a world of material competition. Although the theme is important, the performance art staging is inconsistent in its ability to express those issues.

Three of the five plays in this evening of new work are definitely keepers. The audience comes away from the show with a deepened sense of the human complexity in the Middle East. We're lucky to have this annual series in the Bay Area. "ReOrient" is definitely worth a visit.

Rating: Three stars

E-mail John Angell Grant at jagplays@paloaltodailynews.com.