A twelve-member cast enacts Scheherazade's tales of love, lust, comedy, and dreams. Scheherazade's cliffhanger stories prevent her husband, the cruel ruler Shahryar, from murdering her, and after 1,001 nights, Shahryar is cured of his madness, and Scheherazade returns to her family. This adaptation offers a wonderful blend of the lesser-known tales from Arabian Nights with the recurring theme of how the magic of storytelling holds the power to change people. The final scene brings the audience back to a modern day Baghdad with the wail of air raid sirens threatening the rich culture and history that are embodied by these tales.

MARY ZIMMERMAN is a professor of performance studies at Northwestern University. In 1998, she was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2002, she won the Tony Award for Best Director. She has adapted-directed Metamorphoses, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, The Odyssey, The Arabian Nights, Eleven Rooms of Proust, and Journey to the West. Mostly recently she directed and wrote the libretto for Galileo Galilee, the new opera by Philip Glass, which premiered at the Goodman Theatre.

"If you want theatre at its most unpretentiously poetic, most fetchingly stylish, as humane as it is elegant, I commend to you The Arabian Nights." —New York Magazine

"There's a saying that nobody can read the entire Arabian Nights without dying of pleasure. In Zimmernan's production, that seems a possibility." —USA Today

"[A] feast for the eyes and ears." —Chicago Magazine