Immigrant Theatre Project

Immigrant Theatre Project presents excerpts from Two Plays: Heresy by Sabina Berman and The Word Progress on My Mother’s Lips Doesn’t Ring True by Matei Visniec. Each play is the story of a society imploding: destorying its citizens with religious righteousness, bigotry, ethnic hatred, and societal pathology.

Berman’s play describes the descent into madness of Mexican society as the Inquisition is imported to the new world, destroying the Jewish “converso” citizens who fled the Inquisition in Spain.

Visniec’s play describes the horrific after-effect of the Yugoslavian wars in Bosnia, and the eternal suffering of that part of the world through two millenia of war and genocide.

The plays prove to be extremely relevant to our stressed, confusing, and frightening times. Besides being moral lessons on how societies can self-destruct through ethnic hatred and fear, both Heresy and The Word Progress… provide a non-American viewpoint from older nations that have experienced centuries of oppression and disruption (Conquista, world wars, empires risen and fallen). They are the sad voice of experience that we, as a younger nation, might heed for our survival.

The Immigrant Theatre Project is being presented as part of the Impact Festival.