The stories flowing throughout Mary Zimmerman's exquisite "The Arabian Nights" exist for their own sake. Timeless yet timely, they show human beings at their worst and best.
Adapted from "The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night," Tony Award- winning writer/director Zimmerman selects some of the less popular stories, staging them with her signature style of elegant physical storytelling. The winding narratives of desire, innocence, morality and philosophy ultimately coalesce into a poetic tapestry of theatrical imagination.
The dexterous ensemble of actors that Zimmerman has assembled at Berkeley Rep mesh as a sensual free- flowing collective combining the grace and choreography of dance with sly comic asides, sexy nuances and detailed dramatic performances.
While Zimmerman is the production's over-arching architect, her love of the story and visual storytelling maintains the focus. A Chinese box series of stories continually reveal themselves through the frame of clever young bride Scheherezade keeping herself alive from night to night.
Sofia Jean Gomez's bright resourceful Scheherezade has a compelling mix of earthiness and intellect. Her Scheherezade has been forced to marry King Shahryar, who does not trust women after finding his first wife in the intimate embrace of one of her slaves. Now Shahryar marries a virgin every night and kills her the next morning to make sure she doesn't betray him. Ryan Artzberger brings a brooding melancholy to the king aptly displaying his dissolute temper.
Scheherezade's famous strategy to survive Shahryar's madness is to begin a story at bedtime and tell it through the night. When morning comes they must sleep before the story has finished, and she takes it up again in the evening, finishing one then starting another. In this way she prolongs her life while gradually renewing the dissolute king's sensitivity and finally gaining his trust and love.
The stories unfold in fluid action as Scheherezade tells them. The episodes include "The Madman's Tale," with excellent Noshir Dalal and "Sympathy the Learned," with a stunning performance by Alana Arenas.
Figuring centrally in several stories is Barzin Akhavan's studied Harun al-Rashid, a prominent, highly regarded sheik. Akhavan is well-known regionally for his fine work at the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and here shows an artless flexibility that facilely serves the production.
Other standouts in the uniformly excellent ensemble are Stacy Yen, Allen Gilmore, Louis Tucci, Nicole Shaloub and Pranidhi Varshney.
While there is a palpable joy in this production, it's also tempered with a subtle connection to Iran today and the numbing effects of a seemingly unending war. This production, however, ultimately celebrates imagination and the restoration of humanity.
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