All remaining performances sold out

Thank you Bay Area, for your amazing reception of The Arabian Nights. Your wonderful and generous response has made The Arabian Nights hotter than sand in the desert! On behalf of the actors and musicians, design team, production and run crew, staff, ushers and all the other volunteers who work so hard to create an extraordinary experience for you, we say thanks! If you’ve gotten to see (or will see) the show, super! If not, please join us for our next play, In the Next Room (or the vibrator play). It’s our 50th world premiere and a show we are very proud to present. Thank you!

written and directed by mary zimmerman
adapted from the book of the thousand nights and one night
a co-production with kansas city repertory theatre
main season | thrust stage
november 13, 2008–january 18 2009

Extended through January 18

Running time: 2 hours and 35 minutes,
including one 15 minute intermission

the play

Mary Zimmerman’s Argonautika was a sold-out, seven-week sensation. Now she returns to Berkeley Rep with her remarkable take on The Arabian Nights. The Tony Award-winning creator of Metamorphoses made her career by reanimating ancient myths, and here she breathes new life into the legend of the 1,001 nights. To save her life, a beautiful bride must spin hypnotic tales of genies, jesters, thieves and kings—winning her freedom by eventually winning her husband’s heart. As he falls under Scheherazade’s spell, Zimmerman enchants the audience as well with her signature style that transforms simplicity into the sublime. Amidst a thousand tales of honor, revenge and humor, only love emerges victorious.

the players

Mary Zimmerman received the 2002 Tony Award for directing Metamorphoses. Like her other hits—Argonautika, Journey to the West, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and The Secret in the Wings—that show made its West Coast premiere at Berkeley Rep. This is her sixth production at Berkeley Rep, and this time she works her magic on the intimate Thrust Stage.

the buzz

“Enchantment…Stories are flying carpets in Mary Zimmerman’s The Arabian Nights. Performed by 15 resourceful actors and staged with a maximum of invention by Zimmerman, the ancient tales magically transport the Berkeley Repertory Theatre audience from a king’s bedroom in Baghdad through markets, harems, courts and a crowded privy, and from heights of hilarity to sobering affirmations of shared humanity…Zimmerman has a genius for building stage spectaculars from the most basic, old-fashioned materials [and] the actors transform themselves into an exhilarating panoply of expertly etched characters.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“a magical night of theater…wildly funny, touchingly emotional, highly dramatic, visually captivating, madly energetic…There is a grand-slam, winning-the-World-Series sort of exhilaration to seeing top-notch theater performed by actors working at the peak of their game. You could feel it Wednesday night in the intermission buzz at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s production of Mary Zimmerman’s The Arabian Nights, a spectacular retelling of the old ‘1,001 nights’ tales staged so wonderfully well that you feel somehow better off just to have been in the theater that night. This rare and breathtaking piece of theater made it into my all-time Top 10 list maybe 15 minutes after it started, and it just kept climbing the chart as its 2 1/2-hour production flew along.”—Contra Costa Times

“A sultry fantasy that refreshes the senses…Berkeley Rep’s Arabian Nights casts a spell of myth and whimsy…Tony-winning theater alchemist Mary Zimmerman has become famous for breathing fresh life into primal fables, from Metamorphoses to Argonautika. Time and again, she reconnects us to the myths and fables dancing at the edges of our collective subconscious…It’s a celebration of the craft of the storyteller from which we too emerge recharged, renewed.”—San Jose Mercury News

“One thing that makes Zimmerman’s Arabian Nights so special is that it conveys a sumptuousness of aesthetic and imagination, yet might enchant nearly as much if performed by these actors in ordinary street dress on a patch of lawn. Like Scheherazade herself, the show conjures storytelling magic out of thin air; the true production values here aren’t material, but human…Positive appreciation of Islam and the Arabic world is particularly welcome. Not to mention nearly three hours of exhilarating, imaginative theatrical escape.”—Variety

“Zimmerman’s got a great gimmick: she creates beautifully designed, expertly acted vehicles for sophisticated storytelling. In a very grown-up way, she turns us into kids slathering for a juicy bedtime story. And she always delivers…Zimmerman’s 15-member ensemble tumbles and spins through the tales with grace and glee. They drum, they play stringed instruments, sing, dance and jump from one character to another with ease and clarity. And they’re gorgeous in the shimmering, flowing robes and gowns and drapes provided by costumer Mara Blumenfeld. [Yet] The Arabian Nights never devolves into frivolity. There’s weight to the stories that comes from sadness and wisdom, and when, at the end, Zimmerman echoes present-day Baghdad, the oft-described ‘city of peace and poets,’ we sense the depth of history and our place in it.”—Examiner.com

“Berkeley Repertory has opened a magnificent production of The Arabian Nights, written and directed by Tony Award-winning Mary Zimmerman…Tales of romance, intrigue and betrayal, brilliantly performed by a superbly talented cast of 15. And it’s all backed by traditional music and a fabulous open set…It’s truly a spectacle to behold, and it’s just perfect for the holidays.”—KGO-AM

“If you want theatre at its most unpretentiously poetic, most fetchingly stylish, as humane as it is elegant, I commend to you The Arabian Nights. [It] sails as smoothly and magically as the caliph’s boat on the moonlit waves of the Tigris.”—New York magazine

“The fables delight and instruct while steaming toward an unsettling finish.”—Washington Post

“[A] feast for the eyes and ears.”—Chicago Magazine

“Zimmerman could stage the Chicago phone book and have it be fascinating.”—USA Today