On June 11, ten days before the first performances of Mary Zimmerman’s much-anticipated new show, The Jungle Book, at the Goodman Theatre, Silk Road Rising artistic director Jamil Khoury fired a missive into the blogosphere that got the attention of the local theater community by blasting the writer-director.
In 2007, when Khoury’s company was hosting a conference of south Asian theater professionals, he’d taken a couple dozen attendees to a performance of a Zimmerman play at the Goodman. The piece was Mirror of the Invisible World, an adaptation of the Haft Paykar, a 12th-century Persian romance, which seemed like a felicitous choice for the group. But, Khoury wrote in his essay, “Minutes into the play, my heart sank. Before our eyes was ‘Orientalism Live on Stage and With a Vengeance!’ Or ‘How to Take Every Stereotype of Asian and Middle Eastern People and Cram Them Into One Play.’” At intermission, “we conference organizers faced a near mutiny.”
She also opined that there might be a surplus of righteous indignation around.
To set the record straight, Khoury included Zimmerman’s e-mailed answers to a list of questions he’d given her. While she didn’t deny saying it, she “disavowed” the phrase “racism is in the eye of the beholder.” What she’d meant, she wrote, was that the attribution of one race or another to the Disney film’s King Louie—an animated drawing of an animal—was something that happened in the mind of the person looking at it. She maintained that the character “was in fact conceived for and voiced by Louis Prima,” a white man. And she wrote that her comments were part of “a much longer conversation,” which, according to her “understanding,” had been excised in the published interview.
