DIS-Oriented - a Trio of Middle Eastern and Asian American Solo Performers

Cultural indigestion, color-blindness and inter-ethnic vertigo. Is there a cure? Is it treatable? Is it contagious? That's what three women, Zahra, Thao and Coke -- Iranian, Vietnamese and Okinawan/Japanese -- try to find out as they aim to DIS-ORIENT themselves from external stereotypes and internal expectations.

This show features a dynamic trio of performers whose individual solo pieces will lead you across a Muslim-Atheist supper table, the Mekong Delta, and Diagnostic Systems of Sexual Dysfunction. In between each solo performance are smart and biting vignettes -- comic sketches, audience improv games, and contemporary dance -- that will leave you happy to be as DIS-ORIENTED as they are.


Zahra Noorbakhsh
All Atheists Are Muslim
It's time for Zahra and Duncan to move in together. She just needs to convince her Iranian, Muslim parents that her white, Atheist, Infidel boyfriend should move in with her. Yup, it's just your regular, everyday story of "Boy meets Girl meets thousands of years of cultural tradition and religious doctrine." Can she do it? Come find out! You may even discover your more Muslim than you think.


Colleen "Coke" Nakamoto
Soft Tissue (Bloodlines excerpt)
What makes a girl turn a woman? Is it easy or is it hard? Do you have to take a test to become a real woman, and how do you know when you are one? These are questions Coke has to navigate by herself, since none of the people or professionals to whom she turns are able to help her body (her you-know-what) to open up and say "yes." During her solitary tour of her body, she bumps into truths about her cultureno, make that plural, culturesthat help her to realize that her tour is not solitary at all. What is the secret that is shared by women worldwide? What lives in her soft tissue?


Thao P. Nguyen
Fortunate Daughter
Thao, 25, wakes up on a good morning in Vietnam, dons her full-metal jacket and goes deer hunting on Hamburger Hill with Forrest Gump and Martin Sheen. Only she survives. Later, her mom takes her to meet her grandmother for the first time.