Word: shahriyar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Under Malik’s direction, however, the cast and crew emphasized the play’s subtle elusiveness to great effect, particularly in the fantastic initial encounter between Shahrazad (Zia A. Okocha ’08) and Shahriyar (James M. Leaf...
...maybe I should recap. In the famed “Thousand and One Nights,” King Shahriyar reacts somewhat poorly to his wife’s infidelity: He executes her, declares all women to be unfaithful, and marries a succession of virgins only to have each one executed the following morning. Irritatingly enough, he runs out of virgins...
...then Shahrazad offers herself to Shahriyar. Knowing that she will be killed in the morning, Shahrazad begins telling her new husband a story, only to break off at a suspenseful moment. Shahriyar allows her to survive until the following evening, and Shahrazad ends the first story only to begin another. She does this 1000 more times...
...Shahriyar must have felt it, too, because he quickly heads off to travel the world with his vizier Qamar (Aseem A. Shukla ’11). Shukla’s perfomance was the perfect foil to Leaf’s nervy, wild-eyed flights of philosophical longing. As Shahriyar desperately hovered “between the earth and the heavens,” Qamar stayed rooted firmly to the ground...
...Shahriyar may see Shahrazad as the vessel of all earthly knowledge and heavenly splendor, but that notion has walked hand-in-hand with more obvious forms of sexism for centuries. One should also consider that al-Hakim once wrote a manifesto in which he declared himself to be “an enemy of woman.” Still, there is something to be said for remaining faithful to a playwright’s own vision, and Malik and company seem to have done that to best of their ability...
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