Nicole Umayam

“There is a community of the spirit...
Open your hands,
if you want to be held.”

“We have a diverse cast, in terms of ethnicity, age and gender, both students and members of the community. So one of our first discoveries was a way to use this,” Heckel said. “At times during the production the men will do several poems by themselves, being witnessed by the women, and the women will do several poems witnessed by the men.”

The cast also divides at times into Elders, the Present Tense group (mid to late 20s) and the Future group of younger participants. “We’ll explore relationships between the groups, and what they have to say to each other,” Heckel said. “At first you have to recognize and pay tribute to the differences, and hopefully by the end of the evening the differences will collapse in on themselves, the way they do in Rumi’s poetry.”