SAN FRANCISCO: Golden Thread Productions has announced the lineup of plays and playwrights for its ReOrient 2019 Festival of Short Plays. The programming will feature seven plays showcasing the multiplicity of stories, voices, and styles from the Middle East. The festival will be presented at Potrero Stage Oct. 18-Nov. 17, 2019.
“This year, we received the highest number of submissions ever for ReOrient, and the caliber of the writing was exceptional,” said artistic director Torange Yeghiazarian in a statement. “As we approach the 20th anniversary of this festival, I’m thrilled to find our artistic community both responsive to news headlines and aesthetically subversive. We can all use a strong dose of reorienting, particularly as it concerns our relationship to the Middle East and its growing immigrant population in the U.S.”
The festival playwrights and plays were selected from a pool of 108 submissions from 13 countries. The lineup will include Egyptian American playwright Yussef El Guindi (Brass Knuckles), Bay Area-based Palestinian American playwright Betty Shamieh (An Echo of Laughter), MacArthur Fellow and playwright Naomi Wallace (The Book of Mima), Iraqi American writer and actor Rendah Heywood (The Grievance Club), Noor Theatre founding artistic director Lameece Issaq (Noor and Hadi Go to Hogwarts), Turkish-Kurdish writer and filmmaker Mustafa Kaymak (The Basement), and local Iranian American writer Niku Sharei (In Spenglic).
In addition, six playwrights of Middle Eastern descent received honorable mentions: Hassan Abdulrazzak (The Tune is Always Better on the Other Side), Adam Ashraf El-Sayigh (The Bug), Hannah Khalil (The Yellow Coat), Nabra Nelson (Induced Labor), William Mohammad Razavi (Wenceslaus Square), and Edessa Tailo (Bullseye).
