Silk Road Rising presents the world premiere of 'The Lake Effect' by Rajiv Joseph

Award-winning Chicago-based theatre company Silk Road Rising produced the world premiere of the Jeff Awards-recommended play The Lake Effect by Indian American playwright Rajiv Joseph. The cast included Adam Poss, Minita Gandhi, and Mark Smith.

Rajiv Joseph is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and an award-winning playwright. He has been called "daring, magnificent, and virtuosic" by the L.A. Times, and has received a United States Artists Grant, the Whiting Award, the Glickman Award, and the National Endowment for the Arts Outstanding New American Play grant. He was a writer on the Showtime television series Nurse Jackie.

The Lake Effect is about an Indian American family. In a depressed Cleveland neighborhood amidst a fierce winter storm, Vijay and Priya, long-estranged brother and sister, are reunited by the sudden death of their father. Enter Bernard, their late father's African American confidante and gambling bookie, and a slew of family secrets get unearthed. From agonizing distrust to pensive absolution, these three complicated individuals find themselves stumbling through perversions of truth and reality. The Lake Effect sets in motion a complicated web of relationships and conflicts that challenge our perceptions of race, gender, and success. The play runs approximately 90 minutes with no intermission.

In a letter to patrons, playwright Rajiv Joseph writes: "I'm of mixed race; my father is from Kerala, India, my mom is from Cleveland, where I was raised. Growing up, I feel like I've been equally a part of both worlds. Being mixed-race has always been a part of my identity and although, on the one hand, there might be a sense of always feeling a little bit like an outsider, I feel blessed to have grown up belonging to two different races and cultures. The Lake Effect is, in many respects, a play about separate worlds colliding. On one level, these worlds are divided by race and culture, but beyond that, it's a play about secrets and families and what binds us together as just regular people. I'm so excited to have my new play premiere at Silk Road Rising. I hope you will support me, and South Asian artists, by coming to see The Lake Effect."

Silk Road Rising's artistic director, Jamil Khoury, says: "The Lake Effect represents new American theatre at its craftiest. Clever, funny, daring, and unafraid to probe its own discomfort zones. Political correctness, 'model minorities,' and brown-black solidarity quickly unravel in this stunningly frank tale of dysfunctional families and the limits of individualism."

Chris Jones, chief theatre critic for the Chicago Tribune, wrote in his review of the play: "Joseph's rich storytelling abilities — under the direction of Timothy Douglas — are enough to pull you into the story. This play is exploring one of the more emotional of the traumas and questions that often surround parents with estranged (or merely absent) kids. Who has their best interests at heart? Joseph, though, has other fish to fry in his Cleveland curry house. Not the least of those issues is the struggle of the well-educated children of immigrants, who might reject the careful, small-business ways of their parents, and surely do not share their accents, but who inevitably remain tied to their family in ways they struggle to fully process. You're never ahead of this prismatic play, which reminds me in places of Tracy Letts' Superior Donuts, but nonetheless manages to be very distinctive."

The Lake Effect played at Silk Road Rising's permanent 80-seat theatre venue in Chicago's Loop Theatre District, at the Historic Chicago Temple Building, 77 West Washington Street. Performances ran Thursdays through Sundays through May 26.

Silk Road Rising creates live theatre and online videos that tell stories through primarily Asian American and Middle Eastern American lenses. Founded in 2002 by Malik Gillani and Jamil Khoury as an artistic response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, the theatre showcases voices that are seldom heard on America's stages. In April 2013, the theatre received the ChangeMakers Award from South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) in Washington, D.C.