Unloved Stories

It's an ancient story: King Shahryar marries a series of women, killing each of them the morning after their wedding night. When the crafty Scheherazade marries him, she begins telling him a new story every night but doesn't disclose the ending until the following day, just before beginning a new one. When she finally finishes less than three years later, he loves her too much to have her beheaded. The story of the One Thousand and One Arabian Nights takes a contemporary direction in Jason Grote's comic drama 1001. The show, which debuted in New York last year, had a limited run last weekend with UW-Milwaukee's Department of Theatre. UWM's production of 1001 was a competent staging of an uninspired script that fails to make much of an impression.

Grote's 1001 combines the traditional story of Scheherazade (played here by Toni Martin) with a modern story of a Palestinian graduate student named Dahna (also played by Martin) who falls in love with a Jewish man named Alan (played by David Rothrock, who also plays Shahryar). The mirror format amplifies Grote's theme that all stories are ultimately connected.

The dialog plays along quite cleverly by allowing Shahryar and Scheherazade to speak in the 20th-century vernacular that would be familiar to Dahna and Alan. The two mirrored stories fit together quite well in the midst of the stories being told over the course of the play, but while there seems to be a genuine love of storytelling here, there doesn't seem to be a particular love for any of the stories being told. As a result, the play as a whole fades into nebulous details in spite of its well-executed staging.

UWM's next show is a studio production of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, which runs the weekend of Oct. 29 at UWM's Kenilworth Square East.