Below are some production shots taken by Evan Sung.

Each Thursday and Saturday night, after the show, follow DJ Arisa Sound (our beautiful and talented DJ) from 1001 to Flute Bar on 40 East 20th Street.

With your ticket stub from 1001, you’ll get a 10% discount on your tab. Flute’s intimate and the perfect place to grab a drink and chill after seeing 1001. Plus, you’ll get to groove to DJ Arisa’s spinning.

We had our first public performance yesterday. It was exhilirating, nerve-wracking and kind of a crazy - in a great way. In the meantime, I’m attaching two pics that I took this past weekend of tech. The real pics are going to be posted soon.

Don’t forget to buy your tix soon! Performances this week are tonight through Saturday (10/27) at 8:00 - and we’re sold-out this Friday night.

In an homage to a scene in 1001, this week, Jason Grote and current P73 Playwriting Fellow Krista Knight took some time out of their respective busy schedules to IM about 1001, Edward Said and Alvin Toffler (Don’t worry. We have no idea who he is either.) Here are highlights of their IM conversation.

Cast of Characters:

“Me” - Krista Knight

“Jason” - Jason Grote

Me: hi, jason!

Jason: hey, krista! sorry. i had to step away for a minute.

Me: no problem! ready for some questions?

Jason: yes!

Me: ok! where did 1001 come from?

Jason: i kept having synchronicities involving the arabian nights, which i had never read. many of these were just journalistic cliches in the wake of 9/11, but others were more profound - like, i was reading borges and discovered the essay that eventually made its way into the play.

Jason: it was built by free-association, kind of. i started with the ideas of the arabian nights, but to do them like italo calvino’s invisible cities.

Me: will the experience be different for people who know items on your bibliography?

Jason: i was tutoring at the new school, and they had collections of this magazine called “the futurist“.

Me: like the movement in the early 20th century?

Jason: no, not like the marinetti futurism. it was alvin toffler of future shock, and all of those MIT and stanford guys. they accurately predicted what the internet would be like (at least web 1.0) but also had all these goofy ideas like underwater cities by the year 2000.

Me: hahah. next play.

Jason: so i wanted to use that as a sort of template - scheherazade would tell stories of this imagined future.

Me: ahh

Jason: i discovered on the way that poe had written a similar story - scheherezade tells of 19th-century wonders, like zeppelins and the telegraph, but shahriyar finds this too far-fetched and kills her… i read this alisa solomon essay at one point, outlining the history of orientalist melodrama - the western (usually british) couple whose relationship is stale, so they go to some backwater outpost and rekindle their love.

Jason: so i thought it might be interesting to have an orientalist melodrama of the mind. instead of being about some other country, the other country is the imagination. this led me to orientalism (said), which led me to think that alan and dahna should be jewish and palestinian — and voila.

Me:and the modern couple is trying to go through some kindling too? hehe. … how has the process of production been so far? have you been doing rewrites for the NY premiere?

Jason: but to answer an earlier q re: bibliography (get to ny in a sec): the idea is that there are dozens of little payoffs throughout the script that might enhance an audience’s enjoyment slightly, but that aren’t necessary for the experience — and even an educated audience will have to give up trying to figure it out. ethan mcsweeny puts it well: the story doesn’t begin when the play begins and doesn’t end when the play ends.

Me: so one continues to make their own leaps and bounds of story association.

Jason: my hope is that audiences will want to continue to participate in the story somehow … now, onto ny! the rewrites have been mostly cuts. mainly in the yahya scene — that’s the first and the most complete of the scheherezade stories … it’s something of a necessary flaw, but it’s a little overlong. as far as ny goes, doing the show in ny is very different from doing a show regionally - a regional show has somewhat of a camp/college dorm/desert island feel - plus i teach full time and fall has been crazy and i’m sick.

Me: oh, no! i guess no time to be nervous then?

Jason: no, i mean, i am nervous, because this is such a high-stakes thing for me — it’s my big ny debut. i’ve been in this really odd limbo … everyone who knows my work has either read it, or heard it in readings or been in some workshop with me and the fact is that this is a really special play to me and to a lot of people. it feels weird to say that…

Me: it’s certainly on the lips. it seems that a lot of people are excited.

Jason: but i’ve seen a lot of really excellent plays ruined by big institutional theaters that don’t really understand them. thanks krista! i do feel like i’m in really good hands with p73 and caroline and erica and doug.

Me: was it helpful having just finished the fellowship with them?

Jason: it’s the right mix of uptown, having-your-shit together institutional legitimacy and scrappy d.i.y. energy.

Me: haha.

Jason: i like the fact that i get to be heavily involved in the marketing angle, though that is also a huge responsibility. yes, the fellowship was great. we had a year to get to know each other and get any fights we were going to have out of the way. and now i feel like it’s a really good team.

Jason: i know that sounds like fluff, which i hate - and i don’t think asher or liz are going to mind if i do say that we did have arguments - but i also feel like we got everything out of the way and now we’re really all on the same page (i was trying to avoid that metaphor). p73 really does deserve their great reputation of filling in where a lot of the institutional theaters have really failed…

Me: i agree. i feel like p73 really catalyzes. and so what are you working on next?

Jason:… i have a sloan commission from e.s.t. - like your play, it deals with evolution - but it’s about the way social darwinism is mistaken for darwinism. one line synopsis: darwin on survivor.

Me: haha! cool! can’t wait to read it.

A couple of weeks ago, the amazing Rachel Hauck brought a preliminary model of the set. To the right are two pics that Rachel took.  We’re in the ’round.  It’s still changing, I believe.  But we remain in the ’round.  

Tickets go on sale Monday, September 17th. The first 101 tickets are $10.01 (two tickets per person).

Click here and use Special Discount Code EB1001! In the meantime, we’re prep’ing for the first rehearsal (rehearsal begins this Saturday, September 22).