Arabian Nights

People's Light & Theatre Co., Conestoga Rd., Malvern, through Jan. 5, (610)647-1900.

Visually and narratively opulent, Arabian Nights is an experiment in communal storytelling, with 10 ancient stories adapted to the stage by director Abigail Adams and actor Alda Cortese. This is People's Light & Theatre's holiday show as well as the second production of their new Family Discovery Series — the idea was to create a show which would appeal both to children and to their parents, which would be accessible to people who have never before been to the theater and would simultaneously please seasoned theatergoers. They seem to have succeeded, just as Adams did last year with her production of Grimm Tales (although I'm not sure how much of the truncated plots and extensive vocabulary young children will understand). But they will surely enjoy the music (composed by Paul Arslanian), the belly dancing (choreographed by Billy Yalowitz), the lavish and spectacular costumes (designed by Marla J. Jurglanis) and the gorgeous and evocative set (designed by James F. Pyne Jr.) including a huge net canopy and an ornate Moroccan facade with windows and footholds and marble fountains.

The frame for the playlets is a clever one: a royal family — king, queen, children, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters and various visiting friends — assemble every year to tell and act out stories for each other. Every year they tell the same tales, and every year they find new meaning in them: "It takes a lot of stories to learn to be a human being." Transformation — literal and figurative — is the theme of the stories and their telling, as a wife is changed into a deer (Alda Cortese gets this uncannily right), as the net canopy becomes the sea (Peter DeLaurier and Larry Grant Malvern flip themselves onto it and become battling sea creatures), and magically and theatrically so on and so on.

As the stories near their conclusion, the king (Tom Teti) tells everyone, "Real life is the most amazing story of all," since he and his wife, Shahrazad (Melanye Finister) know how these stories came to be. We, too, know the frame story of the ancient 1001 Arabian Nights — when the king, enraged by his first wife's infidelity, decides to marry a new woman every day, spend one night with her and then execute her. After he considerably depletes the population, brave Shahrazad volunteers to be the next wife. She starts to tell him a story that first night, and so intrigues him that he postpones her beheading until he has heard the end; she keeps intricately weaving story within story, for 1,001 nights, until finally the king has fallen in love with her as well as her storytelling. Their children know nothing of this complicated parental romance, not knowing the reason for their father's sadness and remorse, nor their mother's complex power.

These old stories — about love and loss, envy and greed, beauty, foolishness, jealousy, injustice, courage — the whole business of being human — take on additional meaning as we pick up clues about the personalities of the family members, their relationships, old grudges, unspoken loves. (All this texture in the frame play could be a bit clearer — too little time is spent on them and so too little satisfaction is felt as we watch their stories work out.) A repertory theater company is also something of a family — many of these actors have been working together for many years. It's extended in this production by the young actors from the Company's New Voices Ensemble who play substantial roles, holding their own right alongside the pros.

— Toby Zinman