New York City ensemble Thinkery and Verse presents BRIDE of the GULF, a new play dedicated to the resilience of life in Basra, Iraq, and based upon a transnational collaboration with artists from Iraq’s largest port city. Amid the violence that followed the British withdrawal from Basra in 2007, a sharp-witted Iraqi woman goes in search of her missing husband at the behest of her mother-in-law. 

We are now raising $20,000 to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe--the largest and most exciting arts festival in the world! We have a dynamic story, a big cast, risk-taking technical elements, and a lot of chutzpah, and that makes this is a perfect play for the Ed Fringe. But we need your help! International performances are expensive, and market pressures at the Fringe ensure that ticket sales cannot cover the cost of producing a ground-breaking new play. We are therefore soliciting for enough funds to protect the artists involved, and let our people focus on creativity.

Bride of the Gulf  began as a short play created for the Basra to Boston Project and the Fort Pointe Theatre Channel, and drew on transnational conversations, as well as the playwright's memories of Iraq in 2007 as a U.S. soldier. Using the short play as a starting point, the ensemble then collaborated with Iraqi poet and painter Elham Al Zabaedy, and incorporated her ironic, religious perspective into the play's outlook to a create an original full-length play, Bride of the Gulf.  American composer Sean Ullmer then collaborated with Iraqi composer Kais Ouda to score the show. When creating the play, Thinkery & Verse drew on transnational conversations that took place during our ongoing artistic process, but also on the playwright’s memories of Iraq in 2007: the translators, the journalists, Iraqi citizens, the incoming fire, the kidnappings, the reunions, the violence—and the resiliency of the world’s oldest civilization. 

The creative ensemble draws on recent graduates from one of the top acting conservatories in the world: the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. As a publicly funded university, the ensembles created at Rutgers are enriched by students from a wide variety of economic and ethnic backgrounds, enabling it to smash the barriers to working-class artists in a time of retrenched economic divisions. The creative team, including Karen Alvarado, Abishek Nair, Jahsiah Musig, and Camila Cano-Flavia, spent two years learning the Stanislavskian techniques of Sanford Meisner, and developing an ensemble-based approach to creating physical new work. They then moved to London to study Early Modern performance techniques with celebrated acting teacher Simon Dormandy at Shakespeare’s Globe. 

Led by Karen Alvarado as producer, director and actor, the Edinburgh production includes Co-producers and Brazilian actors Monica Vilela and Miguel de Oliveira who have been with the project since its NY inception, composer Sean Ullmer, Indian actor Sufi Malhotra, Stage Manager Jacqueline Mercer, and set/projection designer Ashley Basile, who are all returning to the project from the latest run. The show welcomes a group of new actors currently attending Mason Gross School of the Arts - Maia Karo, Tshiwela Nematswerani, Matthew Petrucelli and Leslie Roth as well as UK based Technical Director Douglas Mackie and Co-producer Melina Leodis.

So many people have made this project possible! It's been a labor of love for two years running, and the a lot of that labor came from  Amy Merrill, Marc S. Miller, Amir Al-Azraki, Anne Loyer, Kathryn Howell, Roberto Mighty, Noor Chalhoub, Jacqueline S. Chalhoub, Liza Alexis, Daniel Friday, Elena Urdaneta, Hannah Hale, Samir Al-Jasim, Doga Celik, Muge Karagulle, Sophia Mahmud, Ciara Reina, Gabi Singh, Joey Sponseller, Regan Sims, Alex Taylor, Kelsey Koga, Gihee Hong, Amela Karadza, Sydney Mitchell, Sara Billeaux, Jovani Zambrano, Ashley Bufkin, Sofi Duemichen, Lazarus Simmons, Robert Spellman, Kaitlin Ormerod, Andrea Bellamore, Nia Akilah Robinson, Renee Craig, Kevin Kittle, James P. Stanton, Allen Cutler, Cathy Homa-Rocchino, Leslie Lyter, Karin Anderson and The Wall Street Group Inc.

J. M. Meyer became the first playwright to make the long-list for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2010, and now offers a play set in Iraq in 2007, a setting which coincides with his second deployment as a United States Army airborne ranger. 

With surprising humor and hard-earned insight, Bride of the Gulf explores what the invasion of Iraq felt like from the perspective of the people of Basra. Though it draws on the same theatrical vocabulary as plays like Black Watch, it provides a necessary corrective to the Western perspective. This is what transnational collaboration looks like at its best: well-informed, courageous, risk-taking, and profoundly theatrical.