Barriers Desipina & Company
Funding
Barriers and Desipina programs are made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; the Asian Women's Giving Circle, the Nancy Quinn Fund (a project of ART/NY), Off Broadway Angels, and Dramatists Guild Fund.
Barriers played from Sept 7-18, 2011 in the Dorothy B. Williams Theatre.
Show Press
- “Mirza has chosen her medium well–Barriers reaches out and grabs us–wrenches us–to teach us something valuable about the state of the world.”
- — NYTheatre.com
- “... You leave the theater sympathetic to fellow Americans who don’t feel much fellowship at the moment. ”
- — New York Times
About the show
Barriers takes place four months after 9/11 and deals with the Chinese/Pakistani Abbas family, and the loss of their oldest son Nabhil at the World Trade Center. The Abbas's only daughter, Sunima, comes home to announce her pending engagement to a white man. However, Sunima’s news becomes lost in a mire of household problems and she gets trapped in the family loss they never dealt with. As this multi-cultural family begins to fragment, we begin to piece together the past each one hides and the future they all share. Originally mounted in at HERE and then subsequently co-produced with the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco and Los Angeles in 2003, Barriers is returning the stage slightly reworked to look back on the ten-year anniversary of the World Trade Center Tragedy.
Credits
Written by Rehana Lew Mirza
Directed by Colette Robert
Produced by Ying Le
Production Stage Manager: John Nehlich
Set/Costume Designer: Katherine Akiko Day
Sound Designer: Colin Whitely
Lighting Designer: Marie Yokoyama
Assistant Stage Manager: Ben Schaffer
Graphic Design: Nilou Moochhala
Cast:
Pooja Kumar
Sunkrish Bala
Joe Petrilla*
Eileen Rivera*
Jon Norman Schneider*
Rajeev Varma
*These actors are appearing courtesy of Actors' Equity Assocation.
Equity Approved Showcase