A more condensed version of this review first appeared in the website Theatrius https://theatrius.com/2025/04/16/azad-the-rabbit-the-wolf-unleashes-people-puppets-at-golden-thread/
Premiering to the world in a packed house at Potrero Stage on June 14th, the Golden Thread’s and the Hakawati NGO’s joint production of “AZAD, the rabbit and the wolf”, featured a 90-minute dynamic, immersive, experience that left the audience challenged, informed, entertained as well as brimming with further questions and objections. Just as a successful piece of theater should, especially in these times.
On a set suggesting the attic of a Middle Eastern home, actor/writer Sona Tatoyan, tells her autobiographical story, in an engaging tour de force, alternating between Hakawati-style storytelling and confrontation with the shadow puppets of the Karagöz tradition about identity, trauma, the nation-state, the self, the enemy, memory and the family in a story framed by the early twenty century Armenian Genocide and successive waves of forced migrations. The role of art pops in through a trunk hidden in an Aleppo attic containing the puppets from Sona’s great grandfather Abkar Kneadjian, who fled with his family and theater to Syria in 1915. With the locales shifting from the Anatolian peninsula, to Syria, Turkey and the United States, the set of shadow puppets strays from the boundaries of the Middle East tradition to welcome in their midst Western allegorical characters such as the titular rabbit (from Lewis Carrol) and the wolf (Little Red Riding Hood), functioning sometimes as a Greek chorus, or a tribunal convened to press the actor to question her accepted visions of the truth, justice, human action. Irreverent and subversive, the puppets insist on Sona acknowledging the shadow and the light, essential elements of their own being but also an allegory for the whole gamut of the human experience.
Sona Tatoyan in Golden Thread Productions and Hakawati NGO’s “Azad (the Rabbit and the Wolf).”David Allen Studio/Golden Thread Productions and Hakawati NGO
A shift in fact occurs about twenty minutes into the play, involving the demand by the puppets that the storyteller deepen her understanding of the technique used by Scheherazade in “The Thousand One Nights” and choose her own voice and stance among a range of options. Even the demeanor of the audience is called out for transformation at this pivotal point, as what promised to be an ordinary tale of identity, migration and trauma accompanied by entertaining spells and popular theatrical traditions from the Middle East turns into a more serious and challenging reflection on storytelling as healing. It implies a choice between responses to trauma, embodied by the different attitudes displayed by family members in Sona’s own biographical story and the actual characters of the thousand and one nights. The audience is explicitly called on the reflect on their own positions and actions by a series of headlines appearing (and disappearing perhaps a little too quickly) on the curtain of the puppet theater, reminding audiences in a Brechtian epic style that they are but a “Fractured audience from a frayed Empire”. Having been enlightened about the meaning of the rabbit and the wolf, the last line of the play will reveal the nature and identity of Azad, beyond its literal meaning of “free” in Persian.
Photo by Tracy Allen.
As a parting gift to the audience, a cardboard sign detailing the case of Turkish scholar-activist Osman Kavala, founder of Anadolu Kultur, illustrates the real-life consequences of standing with the victim, while being part of “the enemy”, if you inhabit a “kingdom of silence” such as Turkey. Part of the storyteller’s own story, Osman Kavala, was the professor who encouraged her to pursue her family history of trauma in the Armenian Genocide and is still languishing in a Turkish jail after being charged (inaccurately) with participating in the 2013 Gezi Park protests and receiving a life sentence. The performance concludes with an appeal to stand in solidarity with the jailed activist, a stark reminder of situations that are increasingly part of our own fabric of reality in the US.
Photo by Pina Piccolo.
“Azad, the rabbit and the wolf”, by Sona Tatoyan in collaboration with Jared Mezzocchi, directed by Jared Mezzocchi, featuring Sona Tatoyan, Karagöz Puppeteers Vincent Mraz and Kalli Siringas, animating Abkar’s Knadjian’s Tribe; oud player Ara Dinkjian. Playing at Potrero Stage April 11-May 3.
