Azad (the rabbit and the wolf)
For tickets to the world premiere in San Francisco CLICK HERE
An original multimedia play by Sona Tatoyan, a mentee of Dr. Maya Angelou
Created with two time Obie Award winning theater artist Jared Mezzocchi
Produced by actor Bill Pullman, and developed with support of Harvard Artlab.
A timely, kaleidoscopic multimedia play performed with 120-year-old Karagöz shadow puppets that survived the Armenian Genocide, discovered in a magic box in war-torn Aleppo.
A deeply personal tale of transgenerational trauma, a forbidden friendship defying time, borders, and inherited wounds, and the redemption in forgiveness.
AZAD (the rabbit and the wolf) blends the ancient technology of Karagöz shadow puppetry with Middle Eastern folk music, oral storytelling, video projection, and movement to create a quantum journey through identity, inheritance and the unbreakable human spirit.
The Story
Stranded in her abandoned war-torn Aleppo family home during the Syrian war, fearing for her dear friend and mentor Turkish human rights activist Osman Kavala facing life in prison, Sona Tatoyan, a first generation Syrian-Armenian-American film and theatre artist discovers a trunk full of her great-great-grandfather’s handmade Karagöz shadow puppets, salvaged a century earlier from the Armenian Genocide.
These puppets hold their own stories – bawdy, hilarious, haunting – pulling her through a dizzying psychedelic, intergenerational landscape. With the help of master storyteller Scherazad, Sona alchemizes a radiant truth with universal implications: stories, when reimagined, possess the power to transmute trauma to healing.
