The cuckolded King Shahriyah is marrying a new bride every night and beheading her the next morning. As unrest spreads in the Sultanate, his vizier's daughter Scheherazade hatches a plan: she will offer herself as a bride and seduce the king with stories that leave him hanging on every word.

She weaves such tales as Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin and His Magic Lamp with of Borges, Flaubert, and Alan and Dahna -- a Jewish man and an Arab woman who has fallen in love in millennial New York City. Shahriyar becomes Alan and Scheherazabe becomes Dahna as the world mingle and infrom one another.

Modern speech invades the fantasy tales, and swords and genii appear in the 21st Century, in a dance of cultures and people who are forever intertwined.

There once was, praise Allah, a Jason Grote. This Grote lived in the utmost wilderness (a/k/a Brooklyn) where he read many authors - Benjamin, Said, Borges, Gramsci - and watched many videos - Vertigo, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Thriller. One day, he combined these various influences into a play, loosely based on Sir Richard Burton's Arabian Nights. Grote called this play 1001.

Village Voice

...a wild and beautiful glimpse at the yarns that shape our lives...Even if it isn't always true, the story we keep telling -- about the power of love, violence, and death -- is a comfort. Grote tackles that concept with gripping imagination, achieving a cosmic scope by eliminating the barriers between worlds.

Variety

Grote's Orientalist fantasia...conjures a storybook world that dissolves, at a moment's notice, into an apocalyptic, 21st-century landscape. Where to begin to describe this seductive if smartalecky, nonlinear play? ...[ 1001] doesn't preach, and it doesn't underestimate the audience's intelligence.

Washington Post

In Jason Grote's kaleidoscopic reinvention of the '1001 Nights' tales, [Scheherezade] morphs into Dahna, a contemporary Palestinian graduate student in New York, just as Scheherazade's husband, the wife-killing Shahriyar, becomes Dahna's Jewish boyfriend, Alan, and her sister Dunyazade becomes Dahna's sister, Lubna. Moving fluently back and forth from the 'Arabian Nights' of legend (complete with jeweled turbans and scimitars) to New York in a dusty, apocalyptic near-future, these stories within stories come to include Flaubert during his wild-oats days in Egypt and even a cameo appearance by Jorge Luis Borges, the master of labyrinthine fictions.

New York Times

[An] explosive, often brilliant work about America, narrative, the Middle East and identity.

Time Out New York

The first production to come out of Denver Center Theatre Company's New Play Summit is a riot of ideas, experiences and influences... 1001 brings forth a thrilling night in the theater, one in which the senses and the mind race...

Rocky Moutain News

...funny, moving, postmodernist-in-a-good-way... Like Scheherazade's tales, 1001 is endlessly compelling, and also endless (again, in a good way)...

Boston Globe

Jason Grote is one of a generation of brainy new American dramatists – including Tracy Letts and Will Eno – who understand that to reach new audiences, political theater needs to move beyond moral indignation and outrage, past spoon-feeding an attitude. One key to going forward is looking backward into literature, fable and allegory.

LA Weekly

Premiere Production: Denver Center Theater in 2007 directed by Ethan McSweeny