Review: In ‘One Thousand Nights and One Day,’ New Tales of Old Persia

NEW YORK — On the first night of her plan to stay alive, Scheherazade entertains the sultan Shahriyar with a tale that she stops telling before it’s done. He is her new husband, and she has already found his scimitar, encrusted with the blood of the many wives he’s slain. Unless she gives him a reason to keep her around, she’ll be next. She’s counting on her cliffhangers to save her.

“That’s how this story goes, doesn’t it?” she asks him, rhetorically, and suddenly she’s talking about the narrative they’re in. “The monster Shahriyar terrorizes every woman in Persia; brave Scheherazade seduces him with stories until his thirst for blood subsides.”

“You seem weirdly self-aware,” he says.

So are the liveliest moments of Jason Grote and Marisa Michelson’s tangled new musical, “One Thousand Nights and One Day,” a critical deconstruction of the classic Middle Eastern folk tales of “One Thousand and One Nights.” Interweaving a fantastical medieval Persia with contemporary New York, the show is at its best when it flat-out mocks U.S. ignorance and the stubbornness of ethnic clichés.

“Long ago, in ancient Persia,” a friendly narrator (Graham Stevens) begins. A comic pause. “Which is present-day Iran,” he adds. Another pause, because — as “you are products of the American education system” — he’ll have to tell us where Iran is, too. This narrator is called the One-Eyed Arab, never mind that he has two eyes; he’s a stereotype come to life, and as such isn’t required to reflect reality.

The U.S. fear of the Middle Eastern other is at the core of this show, based on Grote’s play “1001” and directed by Erin Ortman for Prospect Theater Company at A.R.T./New York Theaters. But Grote’s book becomes bogged down as it tries to layer a time-shifting plot about two modern-day New Yorkers — Dahna (Sepideh Moafi), from the West Bank, and Alan (Ben Steinfeld), who is Jewish — with the story of Shahriyar (Steinfeld), Scheherazade (Moafi) and the yarns she spins.

Michelson’s music winds through it, by turns spare or richly choral, influenced by Sondheim or the sounds of the Middle East. The actors’ voices are lovely, though an aural muddiness mars the ensemble numbers.

As the plot elements bleed into one another, clarity is in too short supply. The gifted Steinfeld, in particular, has a difficult arc to trace, because (this may be a spoiler) there’s a “Wizard of Oz” thing happening here: Alan has a head wound and this is, apparently, all in his mind. A clue to that is the hospital-curtain set, by Jason Ardizzone-West.

Moafi, forthright and funny, is the cast standout, alongside strong performances by the terrific Stevens; Yassi Noubahar as Lubna, Dahna’s matchmaking sister; and Chad Goodridge as a charming British Palestinian who may be wooing Dahna away from Alan.

A breakup doesn’t seem like a bad idea, actually. The Dahna-Alan relationship isn’t all that compelling.

“Why are we together, Alan?” Dahna asks. “Like really why.”

The answer, it seems, is because the playwright wants them to be. If they had a stronger reason, it might be a more cohesive show.

——

‘One Thousand Nights and One Day’

Through April 29 at A.R.T./New York Theaters, Manhattan; 212-352-3101, prospecttheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.