Featuring Artist-in-Residence Evren Odcikin's ORIENTAL
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
Pre-sale tickets available at a sliding scale ($20 suggested price).
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
EVREN ODCIKIN
(he/him) is a Turkish-American director, writer, and arts leader based in New York City and San Francisco. He is a celebrated champion of historically-excluded voices in the American theater through work that is heart-centered, politically engaged, globally minded, and centers joy as resistance. He is committed to building his work with and for the communities it represents. Evren is the proud 2024-25 Artist in Residence at Golden Thread Productions and a 2025 Iris Lab Fellow with UC Santa Cruz. Recent directing: The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar) by Nia Akilah Robinson (Soho Rep, NY Times Critic’s Pick), Macbeth and Mona Mansour’s unseen (Oregon Shakespeare Festival), Eric Reyes Loo’s Simple Mexican Pleasures (NCTC), christopher oscar peña’s our orange sky (Profile Theatre), Torch Song (Marin Theatre), Sylvia Khoury’s Selling Kabul (Northern Stage), as well as workshops of Adam Ashraf Elsayigh’s ALAA: A Family Trilogy (Golden Thread) and Lauren Gunderson’s Muse of Fire (Marin Shakes and Magic Theatre). Playwriting and translation: Commissions and productions at Cal Shakes, NYU Abu Dhabi, Golden Thread, Crowded Fire, and Custom Made. Evren is a founding board member of Middle Eastern North African Theater Makers Alliance. odcikin.com
ELIZABETH CARTER
Director
ELIZABETH CARTER
Favorite productions include Fat Ham (OSF), Confederates (The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis), Crumbs from the Table and Stoop Stories (Aurora Theatre), Wolf Play (Shotgun Players), Sweat and The Legend of Georgia McBride (Center Rep), Steel Magnolias (TheatreWorks SV), As You Like It (California Shakespeare Theater), for colored girls… (African American Shakespeare Co.) and the new musical Sign My Name to Freedom (SF Bay Area Theatre Co.). She was associate director on the ripple the wave that carried me home (Berkeley Rep/Goodman Theatre) and assistant director on How I Learned What I Learned (Oregon Shakespeare Festival). She directed the groundbreaking 2020 virtual King Lear (SF Shakespeare Festival) and Feel the Spirit (Shotgun Players/Colt Couer NYC). Her directorial film debut Bottled Spirits won Best Narrative at the London Pan African Film Festival. She was the inaugural SDCF Lloyd Richards New Futures Resident Director at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and a current Lucas Arts Fellow. elizabethcarterarts.com
TORANGE YEGHIAZARIAN
Dramaturg
TORANGE YEGHIAZARIAN
is an award-winning playwright and director passionate about building community through theater. Her artistic practice reflects her values of radical hospitality and inclusiveness aimed at disrupting stereotypes of the Middle East both within the community and outside of it. A transplant from the 1979 Iranian revolution, Torange believes that life is inherently political and that the personal and the global are inseparable. Her plays frequently explore the cultural divide with tenderness and humor from an immigrant woman’s perspective. As a director, Torange’s focus has been on new plays, experimenting with Middle Eastern performance traditions, and staging poetry. Dubbed the “Margo Jones–founding-mother-figure of Middle Eastern–American theatre”, Torange founded Golden Thread Productions, the first American theatre company devoted to the Middle East, and served as its Executive Artistic Director for twenty-five years. There she created visionary programs such as ReOrient Festival of Short Plays, premiered hundreds of plays, and launched the careers of countless artists. A recipient of the Gerbode Playwright Commission Award, Torange’s plays are published in New Iranian Plays, Performing Iran, and Salaam.Peace Anthology of Middle Eastern American Drama. Torange was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Cairo International Festival. torangeyeghiazarian.com
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We are grateful for the support of the following institutions:
This workshop of ORIENTAL is made possible in part by a generous grant from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation’s New & Experimental Works Program.
ORIENTAL is supported with a writing retreat and artist award as part of Evren’s inclusion in the inaugural theater maker cohort of THE IRIS LAB, located at UC Santa Cruz, created and led by Lisa Marie Rollins.
An earlier version of this play, 1,001 Nights (A Retelling), was co-created with Leila Buck supported by a commission from the New Classics initiative at Cal Shakes (Eric Ting, Artistic Director; Sarah Williams, Managing Director).