(The following review by Peter Marks appeared in the Washington Post, 6/6/09.)
THEATER
'1001' Nights, One Shrewd Playwright
Stories, stories and more stories: They wrap themselves around one another like the strands of a double helix in "1001," Jason Grote's urbane, contemporary riff on the tales of the Arabian nights, staged with a pleasing, all-hands-on-deck gusto by Rorschach Theatre.
As it did last summer with Grote's "This Storm Is What We Call Progress," the troupe — formerly ensconced in a church in Columbia Heights — is starting a season at Georgetown University's Davis Performing Arts Center with a play by this restlessly cerebral dramatist. In such works as "Storm," Grote can engender the feeling that you're running a half-block behind, struggling to catch up with his digressions and allusions.
"1001," by contrast, throws no disorienting dust in your eyes — you don't, in other words, have to be acquainted with such topics as numerology or Kabbalah to be fully immersed. Not that this piece is unchallenging. It's all about the anatomy of storytelling: how stories reflect who we are; how we behave; how we tell so many over the course of our lives that we can get lost in the variety and number of them.
Although Woolly Mammoth Theatre last summer premiered a Grote comedy, "Maria/Stuart," Rorschach might be even better attuned to the playwright's rhythms. That, anyway, is the sense you get from director Randy Baker's vibrant production of "1001," mounted in the round in a black-box space, the Devine Theatre. With a rewarding economy of props — and an evocative array of costumes by Ivania Stack — Baker and his six young actors smoothly propel you through the work's intricately woven maze.
That ubiquitous question of everyday conversation — "Now, where was I?" — sets the structural tone of "1001." It commences in the world of the storyteller of "One Thousand and One Nights," Scheherazade (Yasmin Tuazon), who no sooner begins spinning tales of her native Persia than other stories are spawned, and then stories within stories from other epochs, involving everyone from Flaubert to Alan Dershowitz . . .
(Read more)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/05/AR2009060503148.html
(Jason Grote's work is included in One On One: The Best Women's Monologues for the 21st Century from Applause Theatre and Cinema Books.)