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The inspiration for “One Night,” a nine-hour theatrical event at the Target Margin Theater in Brooklyn, began nearly 3,000 nights ago. Or to put it another way, it began more than 1,000 years ago when some Middle Eastern and Indian folktales first appeared in Arab collections. “One Night” distills these intertwined tales known as “One Thousand and One Nights” or “Arabic Nights”. Some editions contain dozens of stories; some hundreds. So when you think about it, nine hours is not long at all.
“What’s real for me is a long adventure in storytelling,” David Herskovits, art director of Target Margin, said in a recent video call.
A loyal follower of Off Broadway, Target Margin has earned a reputation for over 30 years of telling stories and deconstructing complex texts — Plato’s “Symposium”; Gertrude Stein’s plays; It reintroduces both parts of Goethe’s “Faust” with colorful costumes, fun lights, and adorned scenes in 99-cent shop pizazz. For a company that gleefully runs from German opera to Greek tragedy and Yiddish folklore, a long-running time in the Middle East shouldn’t come as a special surprise. But the company has never worked on a show for many years or offered much food to the audience, such as fruit, pastries, popcorn, chocolate, tofu bowls, grape ceviche.
That work began about eight years ago with Moe Yousuf, then assistant artistic director, now an MBA student (“He’s not stupid,” Herskovits said. Even though the company was later trapped by Eugene O’Neill’s years of exploration, Yousuf At his office in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, he took turns reading “One Thousand and One Nights” aloud with the other members.
Herskovits did not think that anything would necessarily come of this. But he was fascinated by the stories and their complex textual histories.
“No message,” he said excitedly. “What you have is a tradition of stories layered over many different languages, cultures, religions, geographic locations.”
As a longtime storyteller, he has enjoyed the primacy of narrative in stories, particularly the frame story. In this story, King Shahriar, enraged by his wife’s infidelity, decides to marry a virgin each night, sleep with her, and then kill her before he has a chance to tarnish her honor. He kills several women before his vizier presents his own daughter, Scheherazade. That first night – and the next thousand nights – tells such a fascinating story that the king halts his execution before he can continue.
“I always describe this process as: How many different ways can you play with the phone?” Actor Anthony Vaughn Merchant, who joined in 2017, said, referring to the children’s game where players whisper a message to each other and transform the message as the game progresses.
None of these stories play straight, because Target Margin seldom comes up against a text (right next to the company’s name, please) but also because the stories themselves—with their gender, violence, and exotic locations—inviting Orientalist perspectives. . Many of the stories, including the frame story, promote a misogynistic worldview.
Lebanese-born actress Rawya El Chab grew up with these stories. When she started working with Target Margin in 2019, she was worried about how to tell them. “Are we going to say that all these Arab women need saving, which is the narrative that I fear most, that Arab men are savage and Arab women need saving?” she said during a recent video call.
But he soon learned that Target Margin emphasizes collaborative creation that fosters conversation among company members. “A great thing about working with David is the possibility of constant dialogue,” he said.
Dina El-Aziz, an Egyptian costume designer who first worked with Target Margin on “Pay No Attention to the Girl,” has also known these stories since she was a child. And as she told them again, she appreciated the freedoms the company took with them.
“We’re not doing an accurate retelling of ‘The Thousand and One Nights,'” he said. “There’s a bunch of people in a garage in Brooklyn.” It allowed this approach to inform the costumes. “I purposely stayed away from harem pants,” he said.
The pandemic closures have put these explorations on pause. But in the second year of the pandemic, Herskovits felt the urge to return to those stories, combining what the company had already created with new material, adding stories and personal stories from other traditions as well. This was nine hours of “One Night”. For some performances, the company splits the material into two nights; at other times they perform until midnight in the afternoon. Several performances last from dusk until dawn.
“This is the dream,” Herskovits said of their show tonight. “That’s what Scheherazade does.”
This, of course, is a challenge for the players. When Vaughn Merchant first experienced the night performance during a dress rehearsal, he found it exhausting. “Oh, that was like a difficult thing,” he said. But it’s gotten easier since then. Now, he said, the hours fly by.
Al Chab agreed. “You finally feel tired,” he said, “but you feel a sense of liberation, a sense of joy that you’ve accomplished it.”
Herskovits also wants freedom and joy for the audience. That explains the meal as well as Carolyn Mraz’s cozy suite filled with comfy couches, poufs, and poufs. Breaks are encouraged. If someone falls asleep, that’s okay too.
“This might even be great,” said Herskovits. “It’s like you’re a little kid, someone is telling you a story. That would be nice.”
On a rainy Saturday, I stopped at an afternoon-to-night show and settled into the buttercup sofa with a cup of herbal tea. An actress (Kate Budney, originally a stagehand, played playfully in place of an absent actress) stopped by and told a small group of us the biblical story of Esther. The room was then re-arranged for the doorman and the three ladies of Baghdad, derived from the “One Thousand and One Nights” with other stories such as dogs, a dervish, a caliph’s son beating his wife.
The room was reset again for the story of seven Sindbad journeys where tofu bowls were served (delicious!). The actors then took to the stage at the far end of the room to discuss how Scheherazade, who had given birth to King Shahriar three children and entertained him for 1,001 nights, finally won his pardon. (This means she will stay married to a rapist and a serial killer. Happy endings are weird.)
“And this is the end and end of their story,” one performer said with a lively ending.
But of course it wasn’t. It was just after 7:00 pm. There were four more hours until the show was over.
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