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Mary Zimmerman is one of a congeries of avant-garde directors-among them, Robert Wilson, Peter Brook, Pina Bausch, Peter Sellars, the late André Gregory, and Elizabeth LeCompte of the Wooster Group-for whom theatre is a form and a forum where anything can happen. Spectacle is their watchword; not the Saturday-afternoon spectacle engineered by Julie Taymor (or for that matter, a faux avant-gardist like Franco Zeffirelli, whose La Bohème surges with elephants onstage and smoking chimneys)-it is closer to the spectacle of the mind. While these freethinking, free-form directors turn the stage into an Alice-in-Wonderland mise-en-scène, their purpose is lit from behind. Their use of pantomime theatre, of the old arts of commedia dell'arte combined with the latest technology in lighting and stagecraft, all register as a means to an end. What that end may be can be mysterious-after fifty-five years, one word, "Godot," still proves elusive-but an article of avant-garde faith is that all good things come to those who wait.

The multi-layered felicities and perplexities of Zimmerman's adaptation of The Arabian Nights, which opened on February 6, at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre, are many: in and among the bawdy tales, the circular path in which the stories-within-a-story recur, and the mélange of performing tricks-actors playing animals; passengers on a boat moving down a river acted out by a group of actors walking slowly across the tops of low tables constantly being picked up behind them and set down before them-the director presents a view of life set thousands of years past but as up-to-date as an air-raid siren. Arabian, American: take your pick. In Mary Zimmerman's scenario, the scams, scandals, and scantily-clad may look and sound foreign or ancient. But storytelling is theatre at its essence, whether it is Scheherezade spinning stories before a king with a dagger to save her life or a Treasury official before the House Financial Services Committee, where Barney Frank can be as sharp as a knife.

The legendary explorer and translator Sir Richard Burton was the first to translate The Arabian Nights into English with an emphasis on the fuller erotic aspects, in 1885 (he titled it The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, later re-titled The Arabian Nights upon Andrew Lang's abridgement in 1890). The stories have been in existence in some form since the early 800s. They have influenced authors as diverse as Poe, Borges, Dickens, Calvino, and Salman Rushdie; been turned into movies by Disney and Pasolini (yet in another, Catherine Zeta-Jones played Scheherezade as a, I believe the term is, hottie); and served as inspiration for a symphonic suite by Rimsky-Korsakov and several heavy metal bands' albums. Here, Zimmerman casts aside the familiar stories to weave a fuller tale, with the morals buried in the slapstick urges but not unfamiliar to anyone who has ever read a newspaper or heard a family story about someone in a kind of coin toss for his life.

Her previous success, Metamorphoses, revolved around an actual pool of water onstage; for this production (it was first produced in 1992), the set is minimal: lamps on wires which rise and drop on cue, a scattering of rugs, music played onstage by the actors (the lovely music comes from instruments such as the drum-like djembe and tabla and the pear-shaped, six-string oud). With music accompanying the actors, they leap onstage to uncover and unfurl the carpets-that image of a rolled-up carpet will return at the play's end with a melancholy twist. We learn of King Shahyar (a rugged Ryan Artzberger) and his jealous discovery about his beloved, which sets off his nightly routine of a new bride at night, a new corpse by morning. Scheherezade (Sofia Jean Gomez), in an attempt to save not only her life but her younger sister Dunyazade (Stacey Yen), who would be next, begins telling the King one story after another, each lasting until daylight reveals her father outside holding her shroud (for her would-be execution).

In a sense, for the Rep's The Arabian Nights, the actors themselves serve as the stage; they create set after imaginary set with their dialogue and their physical interactions. One highlight involves a tale of a disputed bag in which two actors must describe the contents therein to a judge; the Rep's playbill notes the "contents in 'the wonderful bag' are improvised each performance by different actors chosen at random"; at the press night performance I attended, the magical inventories led to greater and greater audience laughter.

Yet for all of Zimmerman's flashes of fancy and comedy, a serious theme emerges: not of the one book, The Arabian Nights, but of another, the Koran. For the various tales are not merely a night's entertainment but specific parables about daily conduct, each of which has a place in the Koran.

Indeed, the play's highlight is centrally about the contents of the Koran, set forth in the tale of 'Sympathy the Learned' (played powerfully by Alana Arenas), a young woman who matches wits with a king's advisors and takes each scholar's rich-looking robe. (One scaredy-cat simply hands her his garment without even trying to compete.) Sympathy's interrupted monologue continues for ten minutes or so; she relates the number of words in the Koran, even the number of letters, and the answers she gives to various philosophical and mathematical inquiries self-evidently refer to its universal understanding of events large, small, and invisible (at least, to the studious reader). As with the Bible and its orthodox adherents who cringe at even the slightest deviation of interpretation or devaluation, so there are Islamic followers who resent any hint of the blasphemous. Rushdie's deliberate twitting of Mohammed and his wives in The Satanic Verses was well within satirical boundaries-if to satirize is to declare one's individuality within any system-just as Mary Zimmerman's knowledge-gathering version is catnip to anyone who is open-minded about the intellectual impulse.

Avant-garde theatre of the kind sympathetically satirized by Charlie Kaufman in his movie Synechdoche, New York is presently more theory than fact (or act). The inquisitive audience that once fed and nurtured modernism has foundered, finding more companionship entertaining itself with YouTube videos and constant Twittering. Who needs to wait for Godot when you can instant message Mindy? At the same time, it takes some daring to use the Koran as a theatrical trope, even for the sake of goodness. But it makes sense: the Koran is a reflection of the world as we know it; avant-garde theatre is about the world as we do not know it. The original The Arabian Nights was made into the musical Kismet; for a work of intricate scholarship such as the Koran, a different work of art is necessary-art that seeks to convey the author's intent but not to convert the audience. Not without a fight, anyway. That makes not only for good theatre but good thinking.


REVIEW:
The Kansas City Repertory Theatre
The Arabian Nights
Runs through February 22, 2009
Visit the website for performance times
Spencer Theatre
4949 Cherry Street, KCMO
For tickets call 816-235-2700 or online at www.kcrep.org
 

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups.