'1001': a live DJ, an intriguing Web site and reality rewritten
(Credit: Evan Sung )
“1001” is primarily a drama, and it starts out with the epic “The Arabian Nights,” with Scheherazade spinning her tales for a thousand and one nights, hoping to soothe the madness of Shahriyar, a king with a homicidally perverse definition of “honeymoon.” But in Grote’s retelling, Shahriyar finds the multiplying tales familiar. His mind—and Scheherazade’s narrative—eventually lands on the star-crossed tale of Alan, an American Jew in love with Palestinian expat Dahna in a near-future New York City that’s been struck by a dirty bomb. By the play’s end, these two stories have folded into each other, and out into the larger world.
This double-mirrored structure means to give the audience that vertigo which occurs when stories seem to rewrite reality. This is the true subject of “1001,” but it’s easy to miss that theme amid the wonderful flourishes, like a scimitar covered in dried blood or a belly dancer with the grace of a Marx Brother. In fact, “1001” is burdened––sometimes overburdened––by the catalog of ideas and stories that it contains. Grote breaks conventional barriers between one fiction and another (mingling Scheherazade and Hitchcock in one story, introducing the fictional Sinbad the Sailor to the writer Jorge Luis Borges in another), and it takes him a long time before he finds an emotional core.
Fortunately, that core is embodied in Roxanna Hope, who doubles as Scheherazade and Dahna. In Hope’s performance, these women share a sense of vivacity, yet each one is distinct and rooted in her era. She gives individuality to the archetypal Scheherazade and shows emotional brittleness under Dahna’s independent exterior.
The rest of the cast gamely plays dozens of roles in styles ranging from high drama to slapstick. Director Ethan McSweeny strains to keep up with everyone and succeeds in making the stories clear and the staging fluid. He places “1001” in a plausibly 21st-century Arabian Night, balancing a sense of the fictional past with the modern present, but seems more at ease in the play’s late moments of emotional realism than in the earlier ones of myth and wonder.
As good as “1001” is, its Web site is even better. To be more exact, there’s one link, labeled “Enter the Story,” that shunts you into the world of “1001”––that is, the Web site for the “Daily Times,” a fictional Manhattan paper reporting on a catastrophic dirty-bomb attack. Splashed across your screen are statements from President Bush and Mayor Bloomberg, as well as safety tips, directions to refugee checkpoints and links to related pages. It gives you a lightheaded feeling: If you navigate on, will you be stuck in the world of “1001” permanently? It’s a testament to Grote’s imagination that, for a moment, it seems just possible that you will be.
“1001” runs through Nov. 17 at the Nagelberg Theater at the Baruch Performing Arts Center (55 Lexington Ave. between 24th and 25th Sts.) For tickets call 212-352-3101 or visit 1001nyc.com
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