Mark Twain's 1002nd Arabian Night: A Cross-Dressing Burlesque Farce

Celebrating Mark Twain’s little-known (and long-suppressed) gender-bending feminist fiction, this play brings three of his controversial short stories to the stage! The action revolves around Twain’s “1002nd Arabian Night” (1883). Envisioning Scherezade and King Shahiyar the next day, Twain explores what happens when a boy is raised as a girl, and a girl is raised as a boy! Scherezade also narrates two other Twain yarns – “Wapping Alice” (1898) and “How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson” (1902), which deal with the taboo topic of same-sex unions. Disguised as comedies, these three one-act plays reveal Twain’s closeted past as a radical feminist theorist, destabilizing biological categories by suggesting that gender is a performance.