2025 Season: Threads of Solidarity
Golden Thread’s 2025 Season aims to illuminate the interconnectedness of our struggles amplifying Palestinian, Armenian, and Afghan stories. It is our duty — both as artists and as global citizens — to learn from our histories, to tell our stories, and to pass our narratives on to future generations. Through a diverse collection of personal and historical narratives, this season, we honor the strength of those who have endured, who are still fighting, and the voices that refuse to be silenced. Featuring bold world-premiere works by women-identifying artists and fostering both local and national collaborations, this season invites you to join us in community and solidarity.
Productions
What Do the Women Say? 2025
March 8, 2025
What Do the Women Say? celebrates International Women’s Day with a guided meditation and Q&A session led by Ashira Darwish, a Palestinian journalist, therapist, and activist featured in the powerful film Where Olive Trees Weep.
AZAD (the rabbit and the wolf)
April 11, 2025 - May 3, 2025
by Sona Tatoyan in collaboration with Jared Mezzocchi
directed by Jared Mezzocchi
featuring Sona Tatoyan, a tribe of Karagöz Puppets, and oud player Ara Dinkjian
a co-production with Hakawati NGO
Syrian-Armenian-American theatre and film artist Sona Tatoyan, stranded in her family’s abandoned Aleppo home during the Syrian war, discovers her great-great-grandfather’s handmade Karagöz shadow puppets, salvaged from the Armenian Genocide. Guided by the storyteller Scherazad, the puppets unveil bawdy, hilarious, and haunting tales that transport Sona through an intergenerational, psychedelic journey, alchemizing a radiant truth: stories, when reimagined, possess the power to transmute trauma to healing.
HIGHEST RATING!
“The wondrous AZAD (the rabbit and the wolf) combines uproarious shadow puppetry with devastating drama about family history. Every aspect of the show’s mise-en-scène hums with synchronicity.” —San Francisco Chronicle (Read full review)
New Threads Staged Reading Series 2025
June 7, 2025 - June 8, 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.
The Return
August 7, 2025 - August 24, 2025
by Hanna Eady and Edward Mast
directed by Hanna Eady
presented in partnership with Art2Action, Inc.
Two people meeting in an auto-body shop in the mid-sized city Herzliya. They might or might not have known each other in the past. One of them is Palestinian, one of them is Israeli Jewish, and by the end of the play, both of their lives will be changed forever by the realities that surround them.
Pilgrimage
October 25, 2025 - November 10, 2025
by Humaira Ghilzai and Bridgette Dutta Portman
directed by Michelle Talgarow
A co-production with Z Space
Five women embark on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Noor, an Afghan American immigrant, must fulfill her sister’s last wish. Her daughter, Maryam, a tech CEO, seeks to evade her legal woes, while Noor’s nieces—estranged sisters Sosan and Nadia—must complete the pilgrimage to claim their inheritance. Meanwhile, Fatima, a Black Muslim convert and Nadia’s best friend, hopes to find her biological mother. Will this pilgrimage bring the five women closer, or will secrets, rivalries, and old wounds tear them apart?