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Featuring Artist-in-Residence Evren Odcikin's ORIENTAL

New Threads Staged Reading Series 2025

New Threads Staged Reading Series 2025

New Threads is Golden Thread’s annual staged reading series that engages its audience in the process of playmaking and allows writers of Middle Eastern and non-Middle Eastern descent an authentic and supportive space to develop work about the Middle East. Since its launch in 2011, many New Threads plays and playwrights have continued on to receive mainstage productions, including this season’s The Return and Pilgrimage.

June 7, 2025 - June 8, 2025

Potrero Stage

1695 18th Street, San Francisco, CA

Tickets are $20. No one turned away for lack of funds.

The 2025 New Threads Staged Reading Series features two staged reading performances of Artist-in-Residence Evren Odcikin’s new work. Each reading includes a post-show conversation with the audience and the artists.

Oriental, or 1001 Ways to Tie Yourself in Knots

by Evren Odcikin
directed by Elizabeth Carter
dramaturgy by Torange Yeghiazarian

Cengiz has been commissioned to make an adaptation of A Thousand and One Nights from a Very Important Theater Company, and asked to bring his immigrant, Muslim, queer perspective to it. Unfortunately, he is not sure what all that means. As his characters revolt and refuse to tell the stories that he requires of them, can Cengiz face his demons, change the minds and hearts of his audience, and save all the women of the kingdom in the process? ORIENTAL is an absurdist look at the hilarious knots SWANA creatives must tie themselves in to tell their stories and make a career in the American theatre.

Artist Biographies

EVREN ODCIKIN

Playwright

→ Bio

ELIZABETH CARTER

Director

→ Bio

TORANGE YEGHIAZARIAN

Dramaturg

→ Bio

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We are grateful for the support of the following institutions:

An earlier version of this play was created in collaboration with Leila Buck supported by a commission from Cal Shakes’s New Classics program.

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Golden Thread Productions

1695 18th Street, #C101
San Francisco, CA 94107
The ancestral lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone

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