Go see this, y’all! Go on the night when my friend (and Paris Review poetry editor) Robyn Creswell is doing the post-show talkback. Here’s Al-Bassam’s latest (I hope!) synopsis:

BAM Presents THE SPEAKER’S PROGRESS, 10/6-8

A condemned 1960s staging of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night has become the focal point for political resistance blogs and underground social network movements. The state, eager to suppress this dangerous mixture of nostalgia and dissent, commissions The Speaker, a once-radical theater producer now turned regime apologist, to mount a forensic reconstruction and public denunciation of the work. As The Speaker and his group of nonacting volunteers delve deeper into the “reconstruction” they find themselves increasingly engaged with the material they are supposed to be condemning. They soon discover-in the act of performance and the growing participation of their audience-a solidarity that transforms the gathering itself into an unequivocal act of defiance towards the state.

The Speaker’s Progress is the final part of writer, director, and performer Sulayman Al- Bassam’s Arab Shakespeare Trilogy; the second, Richard III: An Arab Tragedy, was presented at BAM’s Muslim Voices festival (Spring 2009). Created along with a core team of actors and artists from across the Arab world and Europe, this unique body of work charts a decade of Arab and Western political and social upheaval following the events of 9/11 to the current leaps for reform made by millions across the region.