Arts Entertainment
II
SUZANNE CHESSLER
Special to the Jewish News
arim Alrawi learned about the Jewish culture while growing up in
Alexandria, Egypt, where his neighbors came from diverse back-
grounds.
Alrawi felt comfortable with his Jewish classmates and considered
one of them the best friend of his youth.
Experiencing that mix of people affected Alrawi's writing, most recently
through his play Chagall's Arabian Nights. The plot combines cultures as it reveals
the actual love story of famed Jewish painter Marc Chagall and dramatizes the
fabled love story and tales spoken by the fictional Arab queen Scheherazade in
Tales from the Arabian Nights.
Alrawi, playwright in residence and literary manager at Meadow Brook
Theatre, introduces his work Wednesday, March 15-April 9 with Robert
Grossman in the role of Chagall. The piece already has won the USA Plays Today
national competition for best script suitable for family presentation.
In a direct way, Alrawi conveys the painter's relationship with a gentile woman
he met between his first and second marriages. Using the fantasy images of color-
ful puppets in all sizes, he conveys Scheherazade's stories told to engross a murder-
ous king and thereby distract him from taking her life.
"When I started at Meadow Brook almost three years ago, I helped select plays
for production, and a lot of people asked for plays that were family friendly,"
Alrawi recalls about the development of his newest work.
"I was looking for a subject that an adult could enjoy and.,children could also
enjoy, not children's plays, and (happened) across a book of the Arabian Nights with
illustrations by Chagall, a painter whose work I really like. I thought it was fascinat-
Combini
Cultures
Egyptian playwright blends
classic "Arabian Nights"
love fable with the true
story of Marc Chagall's
relationship with
a gentile woman.
Above and opposite page: Painter Marc
Chagall was fascinated by "Tales From
the Arabian Nights," and did a series of
lithographs based on them.