The Arabian Nights: A Play (review)

Director and playwright Mary Zimmerman's two-act play The Arabian Nights had its world premiere at the Lookingglass Theatre Company in Chicago on 22 September 1992. Since then The Arabian Nights has been staged many times in theaters across the country and abroad, both with and without Zimmerman as the director. Hearing that the script was to be published in 2005, John H. Y. Wat, drama instructor at Honolulu's Mid-Pacific Institute School of the Arts, immediately made plans to stage the play. Wat was familiar with Zimmerman's work from Chicago and had greatly admired her productions of The Odyssey, Metamorphoses, and The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci at performances in various parts of the country.

Wat became desperate, however, when unforeseen delays at Northwestern University Press stalled the script's publication. With the deadline looming, he e-mailed Zimmerman at Northwestern University, where she is a professor of performance studies, and she graciously sent him the text. In the director's note to the Mid-Pacific Institute School of the Arts' production, Wat states that he read it in one sitting, laughing and weeping throughout, sometimes simultaneously. On 6 May 2005 the Mid-Pacific Institute School of the Arts student production of Zimmerman's play proved Wat's tears and laughter right: The Arabian Nights is theater in the best tradition. It balances comedy with tragedy and universalizes moral truth through the filter of individual characters.

Zimmerman's adaptation of the story cycle known in English as The Arabian Nights is based on the version of the tales published by Edward Powys Mathers in 1923 as The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night. Mathers translated it from the French Le livre des mille nuits et une nuit by Joseph Charles Mardrus, who, inspired by the success of fellow Frenchman Antoine Gallard's first European translation, Les mille et un nuits, in 1704, published his own translation of what he considered the "best" Arabic version, namely the Bulaq, in sixteen volumes between 1899 and 1904. Unlike several other translations of The Arabian Nights previously published in English (e.g., Sir Richard Burton, Edward William Lane, and John Payne), Mathers's translation is very readable. But being a translation twice removed from the Arabic texts, his text also exemplifies many of the problems associated with European translations of The Arabian Nights—in particular, the insertion of non-Arabic tales, the Orientalist representation of Arabic culture, and the overt emphasis on the erotic and exotic.

Mardrus's, and hence Mathers's, text is thus more of an adaptation than a translation. In his companion to The Arabian Nights, British scholar Robert Irwin notes that Mardrus embroidered the original Arabic, inserted whole new stories, and lied about the texts he claimed to be translating from. But to be fair, the reputation of as monumental a figure as Sir Richard Burton does not fare much better. In fact, one of Mardrus's inserted stories is the burlesque "Abu al-Hasan's Historic Indiscretion" (which appears as "The Clarinetist's Tale" in Zimmerman's adaptation). Mardrus likely borrowed this story directly from Burton, who called it "How Abu Hasan Brake Wind," but Irwin declares there is no Arabic original for it.

Speaking of "original" stories in regard to The Arabian Nights, however, deflects from their immense influence on Western narrative tradition and imagination. Over the centuries, The Arabian Nights have emerged from oral and decidedly low-class traditions in the Middle East to a middle- and upper-class literate, and literary, tradition in the West. The narrative is a cycle of stories within stories that are held together by the frame story of clever Scheherezade and despotic Shahryar. This misogynist tyrant has made it a habit to marry a virgin every night and have her executed the next morning so...