Historical journey’s threads unravel
Clever concept, confusing mix of characters
“One Googol and One”: Written by Aidaa Peerzada. Directed by Aidaa Peerzada and Marcelo Javier. Through Dec. 22. Two hours, 20 minutes. Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St., S.F. www.sfbatco. org
There’s a noble impulse behind San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company’s “One Googol and One.”
What if you could respond perfectly when your college history professor doesn’t shut down the racist in the classroom? What if you could stand up in the lecture hall and instantly summon all the stories of your ancestors, all the artistry of your own storytelling craft, and give a work of theater as the ultimate takedown?
You can’t fault Aidaa Peerzada’s play with music for its intentions. Her adaptation of “One Thousand and One Nights,” which opened Saturday, Dec. 8, at Brava Theater, abounds in rich stagecraft possibilities.
The show, originally written as part of a student theater festival at Carnegie Mellon, helped lead to the founding of BATCO — a promising new entrant in the Bay Area theater scene — in 2014. As staged by Peerzada and Marcelo Javier Pereira, the piece gives opportunities for an 11-person cast of a medley of backgrounds, ages and experience levels.
But in its current form, the show has a long way to go to live up to its potential. “One Googol” weaves together scenes of Sher (Peerzada), a college freshman navigating social and academic friction, with snatches of Middle Eastern folklore narrated by Scheherazade (also Peerzada), Sher’s namesake.
The weaving, though, never coheres. The play so breaks up