Brooklyn's Brave New World Repertory Theatre Tackles A MUSLIM IN THE MIDST

Brave New World Repertory Theatre, the Brooklyn-based theatre company that first won acclaim staging To Kill A Mockingbird on the front porches of Victorian Flatbush in 2005, is pleased to present Anand Rao's A Muslim in the Midst in a full production November 1-17at the Actors Fund Art Center, 160 Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn.

Brave New World Rep's mission to examine issues of social justice first attracted the company to Anand Rao's play for their BNWorks Series in January 2018. The post-reading talkback between audience and the playwright/cast lasted for 45 minutes, prompting artistic director Claire Beckman to include a 10-performance run this November as a kick off of BNW's 2018/19 season.

Playwright Rao got the idea for A Muslim in the Midst in Bangalore when he offered a ride in his car to a family of complete strangers stranded on the sidewalk late in the night. The play is the dramatization of those events, which Rao describes as "quiet and uneventful during - but volatile and uncommon in hindsight." A play about 9/11 and its impact on distant societies from an outsider's perspective, A Muslim in the Midst puts into focus the issues around class consciousness, social and educational inequality, gender equality, modern medicine, and perceptions around politics and religion.

Says Beckman, who is directing the production, "In much the same way that BNW created historical distance from which to examine the power struggle between Black and White Americans through the lens of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard set in post-slavery Reconstruction (The Plantation), A Muslim In the Midst creates geographical distance with a post 9/11 story set in the playwright's hometown of Bangalore, India."

Tickets $18-25: here

September 14, 2001: On the streets of Bangalore, India, a poor Muslim family is stranded. Desperate to reach a relative's home in a distant suburb, the new immigrants to the city are struggling to find a ride late in the night. Watching them closely is a Hindu couple, both executives of American companies. The liberal and westernized executive couple offer to take the traditional and rural Muslim couple along. The conversation quickly takes an unexpected turn as the two worlds collide. Fueled by a pro and anti-Islamic rhetoric, and warnings about potential terror threats intermittently playing on the radio, the characters fight within their self-imposed confines of prejudice and fear, in their attempts to look beyond the obvious ideological differences, and unravel a common fellowship based on humanity.

A Muslim in the Midst has been performed at New York's Hudson Guild Theater (2016) to sold-out shows and was nominated for the Best Play/Musical award at that year's Thespis Summerfest. It also was performed at the South Asian Theater Festival at the Rutgers University's Victoria Mastrobuono Theatre, Mason Gross School for Performing Arts (2017) and at Yale University's Crescent Theatre, New Haven, CT.

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