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Symphony Space has teamed with OBIE Award-winning theater company Waterwell for an evening of Stories from the City of Immigrants, Monday, April 20, at 7pm at Symphony Space. Presented in collaboration with the New York Immigration Coalition as part of their NY Proud campaign, the event features a thrilling lineup of actors performing stories that bring to life the vital role immigrants play in New York City’s past, present, and future. Poignant, funny, and surprising, these stories span 125 years and many countries of origin, creating a visceral experience of the epic journeys so many have taken to make NYC their home. Radiating beyond the stage, Stories from the City of Immigrants will be recorded for national broadcast on Symphony Space’s syndicated Selected Shorts radio show and podcast. Documented, New York’s nonprofit, multilingual news site for and about our immigrant communities, is a media partner.
Stories from the City of Immigrants is hosted by Emmy and Tony Award-nominated actor Arian Moayed (Succession, A Doll’s House on Broadway), with a selection of stories curated by OBIE Award-winning director and Waterwell Artistic Director Lee Sunday Evans (Oratorio for Living Things, The Ford/Hill Project) and Liza Zapol, a theater-maker and oral historian. The evening features performances by an extraordinary array of actors including Moayed, Roberta Colindrez (A League of Their Own), Micaela Diamond (Parade), Jayne Houdyshell (Only Murders in the Building), Simu Liu (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), Sunita Mani (GLOW), Justin H. Min (The Umbrella Academy), Sepideh Moafi (The Pitt), Laith Nakli (Ramy), Tramell Tillman (Severance), Pej Vahdat (The Old Man), and others performing monologues from the oral history collections. The women-led samba reggae drumline marching band FogoAzul provides live music throughout.
Stories from the City of Immigrants builds on Symphony Space’s deep history of celebrating and presenting diverse voices and stories. Executive Director Kathy Landau said, “At this moment, when the very place of immigrants in the U.S. is under siege, Symphony Space is proud to stand strong in our belief that immigrants are an indispensable part of the fabric of our city and our country. And with that, to use the national and international reach of Selected Shorts to amplify their stories and help ensure that everyone is included in the conversations shaping our collective future.”
Murad Awawdeh, President and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition, said, “By bringing these stories into the public sphere, we challenge narratives that overlook immigrant contributions and instead celebrate their resilience, adaptability, and leadership. In the very challenging times that we are now living through, we need the power of art and culture to lift up our hearts, giving us renewed connections to the ways that our city’s strength and future depend on embracing and empowering our immigrant neighbors.”
“Stories have undeniable power to pierce our hearts and galvanize us to recognize the humanity in the experience of others,“ said Arian Moayed. “In this volatile time, we are so proud that Waterwell can partner with Symphony Space to bring together an incredible cadre of artists – many of whom have their own personal connections to immigration—to lift up this wide-ranging series of stories that we hope can reach people across the nation.”
“Hearing immigrants’ stories in their own words, performed by extraordinary actors, has a unique power to help us understand their experiences, and to remind us what makes New York City special,” remarked Simu Liu, who is currently starring in Oh, Mary. “I’m honored to be among the incredible lineup of artists bringing these stories to life on stage at Symphony Space and engaging audiences everywhere through the Selected Shorts radio show and podcast.”
Zapol sourced the evening’s stories from books ranging from Hamilton Holt’s The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves (1906) to Saundra Amrhein’s Green Card Stories (2011), and from oral history collections such as the Baldwin-Emerson Elders Project, Center for Brooklyn History’s Muslims in Brooklyn project, the Irish in New York Oral History Project at Queens College, the Washington Heights Oral History Collection at New York Public Library, the New Sanctuary Coalition Testimony Project, the Queens Memory Project, and We Are Brooklyn: Immigrant Voices from the Brooklyn College Listening Project, among others.
The stories include a young Irish girl who comes to the U.S. at age 11 in the 1950s, a tomboy from India who arrives in NYC in the 2000s with a fierce analysis of global power, a Polish garment worker who left her small town in the 1890s with her mother, a Jewish refugee from 1940s Germany, a Palestinian man who started a grocery store and later a catering hall so beloved that his neighbors named a street after him when he died, a young man fleeing post-war Vietnam who eventually brings his entire family to settle as refugees in the 1980s, and a Pakistani cab driver who can say hello in a dozen languages and gets an unexpected gift from a customer.
