Virgin Bride Spins Tales in ‘Arabian Nights’

Dec. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Mary Zimmerman’s new staging of “The Arabian Nights” at California’s Berkeley Repertory Theatre opens with a virtually empty set, a few tarps covering the floor.

The cast enters, dressed in brightly colored Middle Eastern costumes, playing flutes and beating drums (and carrying one of the drummers aloft as if he were riding a flying carpet). They remove the tarps to reveal rich Persian rugs, pillows and a few low tables. Dozens of glowing lamps descend to bathe the stage in a golden light as the story begins.

King Shahryar, heartbroken from the treachery of a former wife, resolves to avoid deceit and disappointment by killing at dawn every woman who enters his bed. In a shocking early scene, we see him slit the throat of his latest virgin bride. This has gone on for three years now, and the kingdom is running out of girls. The citizens are horrified.

“Bring Scheherezade tonight,” the fierce-looking king demands of her father, “and bring her shroud tomorrow.”

Scheherezade, of course, avoids her fate for 1,001 nights by cleverly telling the king a series of romantic tales that always reaches a crucial point right at dawn, thus postponing her execution for another day. Later, as she and the king look on, the versatile cast takes over more of the storytelling.

There are love stories and adventures, moral tales and dirty jokes. There are tales within tales, in which various characters -- the baker, the greengrocer, the butcher -- tell their own stories. Accompanied by flute and drum, acrobatics and asides to the audience, the production owes as much to vaudeville as to Middle Eastern legend.

Baghdad Dream

In one of the best yarns, a Baghdad man is told in a dream that a hidden treasure lies in Cairo. He journeys to Egypt, where he promptly falls into trouble and is arrested. In jail, he tells his story to the chief of police, who recounts his own dream, about a man in Cairo who travels to Baghdad and finds a secret fortune. The hero is released, returns home, and this time the dream is true: He finds the loot.

Zimmerman, a writer-director at Chicago’s Lookingglass and Goodman theaters, keeps things moving with plenty of jokes, stage business and rhythmic Middle Eastern music. The excellent cast, led by Sofia Jean Gomez as Scheherezade, is attractive and athletic. Daniel Ostling’s spare set and Mara Blumenfeld’s glittering costumes add the right notes. (Both were members of Zimmerman’s “Metamorphoses” design team that won her the Tony Award for best direction in 2002.)

Yet the play has one limitation: the quantity of tales themselves, which offer no overarching theme. The production implicitly admits this, when near the end the actors pretend to tell the tales of the 951st to the 1,000th night all at once, in a deafening and incomprehensible roar of competing voices.

Until that point, it’s quite a ride.

“The Arabian Nights” runs through Jan. 18 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. It opens at Kansas City Repertory Theatre on Jan. 30 and at Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre Company on May 20.

(Stephen West writes for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)