October Salon Archives

Eskandar by Allan Baker
Sunday, October 28th at 6:30
State Theatre, 719 Congress Ave.

Eskandar is a modern re-telling of the opera Carmen, set in today's Afghanistan. Joe is a gay Afghan-American, who has returned to Afghanistan as part of a shadowy military unit. There he meets Eskandar, an Afghan boy who was the sexual companion of a warlord killed in an operation carried out by Joe's unit. What develops is an explosive and violent relationship that is shaped by the "force of nature" that is Eskandar, the dark complexities of today's Afghanistan and thousands of years of a cultural heritage almost unknown in the West.

Allan has written six plays since becoming a Script Works member in 2004. His 9/11 play, Five Minutes, which began in the 2005 Weekend Fling, went on to become a FronteraFest "Best of the Fest" choice in 2006. It was produced in New York City in the fall of 2006 as part of the Emerging Artist's Theatre festival of short plays and again there in June of this year as part of the Samuel French Festival of Off-Off Broadway Short Plays. Allan's first play based on an opera, All the Saints, a modern re-telling of Verdi's La Traviata, with gay characters, will be given a staged reading at Zachary Scott Theatre in January of 2008.