Golden Thread Productions

When Torange Yeghirazarian founded Golden Thread in 1996 it was the country’s only theater company dedicated to staging works about the people of the Middle East by Middle Eastern and Middle Eastern- American playwrights. Thirteen years later it still is. On a very small budget the San Francisco based company presents two-full length theatrical productions each year in addition to a week-long festival of shorter works and employs young actors to tour a children’s theater production to local schools and libraries. Thirty-two hundred people saw Golden Thread’s work last year including 750 students. Because the U.S. Census does not allow respondents to identify as Middle-Eastern it is difficult to know how large this broadly defined community is in the Bay Area, however, Golden Thread’s audience is comprised almost equally of people who identify as Armenian, Iranian, Arab or Israeli and those who don’t identify as Middle Eastern. With renewed support this lean organization, which has struggled during its recent grant period to grow its board and generate more income from individual donors, will continue to support artists of Middle Eastern descent performing work about the Middle Eastern experience, to commission a new play by an Arab-American playwright and to illuminate the complexity of Middle Eastern experience on stage for Bay Area audiences of all ages and backgrounds.