To combine a personal family saga with the horrifying, not-so-long-ago history of an entire people, and to tell that story onstage, is a challenge for which Syrian-Armenian-American performer-filmmaker Sona Tatoyan is particularly suited.
In “AZAD (the rabbit and the wolf),” a world premiere produced by Golden Thread Productions and Hakawati NGO, Tatoyan takes the stage in a solo performance with personal and historic images and video projections, onstage musical accompaniment by oud player Ara Dinkjian; and particularly expressive shadow puppets manipulated and voiced with zest and expertise by Vinny Mraz and Kalli Siringas.
As Tatoyan’s intensity and physicality fill San Francisco’s small Potrero Stage, her commitment to the project, which she created along with Jared Mezzocchi, is evident.
In 2019, as she explains, she found herself sequestered in her abandoned ancestral home in Aleppo during the Syrian war. There she discovered a trunkful of her great-great grandfather’s 120-year-old puppets; as a hakawati, a theatrical storyteller, he survived the Armenian genocide and went on to perform throughout the Ottoman empire.
As Tatoyan digs the delicate puppets out of the trunk—they’re apparently made of leather but look paper-thin onstage—they reappear as funny little shadow puppets leaping and jumping around on an illuminated, stage-like screen. This is the kind of bawdy, wacky humor that provides just the right balance for a play that explores painful issues.
Tatoyan’s heritage comprises layers: Syria, Armenia, South-East Turkey, rural Indiana where she was raised; Anatolian. Levantine. Middle Eastern.
She explores more of it than you’d imagine could fit into a 90-minute performance piece.
Throughout, she interacts with the shadow puppets, allowing them to lead her through her own life and legacy of family discord and upheaval (a sheik once prophesized, ominously, that she would suffer, saying, “The source of the suffering will come from within this family”).
Folk tale and literary references, from “Little Red Riding Hood” (the wolf of the title) to “Alice in Wonderland” (the rabbit) to, particularly, “1001 Nights” (ScheherAZAD) weave their ways throughout.
During “AZAD,” Tatoyan, with help of the puppets and her own memory, discovers more and more about herself and her place in her family, in history and in the world as a woman who has perhaps inherited her great-great-grandfather’s talents and lifelong commitment to storytelling.
She also pays tribute to her mentor, the imprisoned Turkish artist/activist Osman Kavala.
It’s a fascinating story but structurally disjointed and at times repetitive. And at the very end, she undercuts it by a monologue in which she tells the audience at great length, what we should have discovered while watching her story, instead of allowing us to make our discoveries—as she herself was able to do.
All of which is to say that this ambitious new project needs more work. Which it deserves.
Golden Thread Productions’ “AZAD” continues through May 3, 2025 at Potrero Stage, 1695 18th St., San Francisco. Tickets are $20-$130 at goldenthread.org.
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