Philip Kan Gotanda, David Henry Hwang, Shishir Kurup, et al. Write for Silk Road’s DNA Trail

Plays by Philip Kan Gotanda, Velina Hasu Houston, David Henry Hwang, Jamil Khoury, Shishir Kurup, Lina Patel, and Elizabeth Wong are all part of Silk Road Theatre Project’s The DNA Trail: A Genealogy of Short Plays about Ancestry, Identity and Utter Confusion, to run March 2 – April 4 in Pierce Hall at The Historic Chicago Temple Building. Steve Scott will direct the production, which has been conceived by Khoury.

For this project, the theater commissioned seven diverse playwrights, asking them to revisit their assumptions about identity politics and the perennial “who am I” question after learning the results of tests on their own DNA that had been processed through Family Tree DNA. The result is a septet of plays that range from Hwang’s A Very DNA Reunion, a comedy about a man who discovers that he’s from the same haplogroup as Cleopatra and Genghis Khan, both of whom come to visit, to Kurup’s Bolt From the Blue, that examines how one connects with family over distance.

The company features Cora Vander Broek, Jennifer Shin, Melissa Kong, Fawzia Mirza, Khurram Mozaffar, Anthony Peeples, and Clayton Stamper.

The creative team includes Rebecca A. Barrett and Lee Keenan (scenic and lighting design), Amy Gabbert (costume design), and Mikhail Fiksel (sound design).

For further information, visit: www.srtp.org.