Review: Reliving those Arabian nights in 'pay no attention to the girl'

Consider, for example, the name of this show, which inaugurates the 27-year-old Target Margin troupe’s new base (and first permanent home), the capacious Doxsee Theater, in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn.

“Pay No Attention to the Girl”? But isn’t “The One Thousand and One Nights” related by a female uber-narrator who commands the total attention of her listener? In it, the cunning Scheherazade staves off her execution by her husband the king, who has a nasty habit of bedding and then slaughtering his brides, by spinning more than a thousand (whew!) artfully cliff-hanging tales.

But “Pay No Attention” — a collaborative product of two years of deep-diving research, readings and workshops — is being performed in 2018, when the silencing of women with stories to tell is an urgent and incendiary topic. (Do I really need to drop the name Harvey Weinstein here?)

The tale from which this show takes its title involves a he-says, she-says situation, in which the word of a young prince is challenged by his royal father’s favorite concubine. He says that she came on to him, but he turned her down; she says it was just the opposite.

From this conflict arises a fantastical array of other stories, pitched to the vacillating king. They are meant to prove the “malice, craft and perfidy” of a) women or b) men, depending upon your point of view. Thus we tumble down a labyrinthine rabbit hole of accounts of men, women and otherworldly beings like djinns and ifrits, as they enthrall and entrap, deceive and conquer one another.

As is always the case with Target Margin — which has devoted earlier seasons to disassembling and reconstructing Chekhov, Eugene O’Neill, Gertrude Stein and Yiddish theater — telling tales is a communal enterprise. Here the narrative village includes not only the core ensemble, but also the very visible technical crew and, implicitly, the listening audience.

That means no curtained proscenium stage, or performers sticking to single roles. The show begins with players and theatergoers alike assembled in the same open space. An actress (Caitlin Nasema Cassidy), who says she is Herskovits, provides some prefatory words before seeming to forget her lines. The other performers fill the silence, finishing and amending one another’s thoughts.

They then move into brightly furnished bleachers, but only briefly. We the audience are commanded to change places with them. The cast — which also includes Deepali Gupta, Samy El-Noury, Anthony Vaughn Merchant and Lori Vega — is set loose to morph into a multitude of persons and creatures.

They rove the wide, wild darkness of the warehouse space, coming in and out of focus. Carolyn Mraz’s set of many movable parts is lighted with homey magic by Kate McGee (love the descending grape-cluster bulbs). The soundscape (by Herskovits, implemented by the company’s resident “sound demon” Jesse Freedman) ranges from the ocean’s roar to the unsettling vintage pop ballad “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss).”

All the while, the cast members, dressed in motley attic-trunk costumes by Dina El-Aziz, keep changing parts — and perspectives — to speak (in Arabic as well as English), sing and mime accounts of men and women making love and war, which are often the same thing.

It is surprisingly easy to follow the plots and characters within these stories framed by stories framed by stories. The ambiguity that pervades this production is deliberate and of a different order.

“Would you like to start with it was, or it wasn’t?” the cast members ask one another near the show’s beginning. And they are prone to occasional fumbling and mumbling, as if suddenly overwhelmed by the vast possibilities of interpretation.

We are also reminded that the seeming misogyny that runs through much of what’s described here is hardly to the taste of these contemporary narrators. A scene in which a prince vanquishes a warrior princess by rape is given the grudging postscript, “And everybody lived” — pause, swallow — “OK ever after.”

But if this show is inevitably and openly defined by a 21st-century gaze, it also revels in the timeless and transcendent power of its source material. Watching “Pay No Attention,” we are much like Scheherazade’s enraptured sultan, still listening to what she has to say, and still trying to make sense of it.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.