Tree of Seeds by Stedroy Cleghorne
Standing on the foundation created by the wonderful readings in London this past December, I am pleased to report that my play, Tree of Seeds, will have a reading in NYC next week!!
Please come out to hear it, I’d love to connect with people interested in producing new voices, new stories, and non-traditional formats.
This is a universal story: migration, memory, cultural identity, told through a specific experience of Parsis (Zoroastrians from South Asia) in Yemen!
I started this piece during my Fulbright Fellowship in India from 2012-2013. Thanks to the wonderful people I met and the help of the PARZOR Foundation, I gathered stories and material to write 10 plays!
Three generations of Parsi women.
On a personal note, I am so pleased to shed some light on the complex, rich histories of my people and the histories of Asian people.
Tell a friend and come!
Thursday, May 15th, 7:00 pm
Queens College – Goldstein Theater
TREE OF SEEDS – A reading of a play-in-progress
Written by Kayhan Irani
Directed by Nandita Shenoy
Tickets are free. Reservation is Required.
Tree of Seeds is a narrative of migration and memory. A young Iranian woman appears on the docks in Yemen. She is taken in by a local Indian family on the eve of an anti-British uprising. As hostilities rise, public and personal boundaries are drawn. Embroidery traditions tell the tale of two communities bound by religion, yet separated by culture, and the history of a people in transition.
Yikes! (Image by Luba Lukova)
AND … I am raising money for freeDimensional an organization I believe in tremendously. They work on behalf of artists and culture workers, around the world, who are being targeted for what they are creating and saying.
We hear, every now and then, about some famous artist who escapes persecution or who was imprisoned. For every famous name, there are hundreds of other names, who work in community, who are known locally, whose persecution does not make international news headlines.
Please donate. Their budget is small, they rely on networks of people helping people, and they build the capacity of others to do this work.
Thank you for reading and spread the good news!