Dishwasher Dreams: Is This America?
By Aladdin Ullah
Directed by Christopher McElroen
Tabla accompaniment by Avi Sharma
In his one-man show “Dishwasher Dreams,” actor and writer Aladdin Ullah draws on the story of his father, Habib, a steamship worker from the region of Noahkali, Bangladesh, who jumped ship and made his way to New York’s Lower East Side in the 1920s, settled in Harlem in the 1930s, worked for years as a dishwasher and line-cook in downtown restaurants, and for a time in the late 1940s ran one of the city’s earliest Indian restaurants just off Broadway in Manhattan’s theater district. In his performance, Aladdin explores his father’s life and experiences in Spanish Harlem in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, as well as his own childhood in the 1970s and 80s, growing up with his family in East Harlem’s Washington Carver projects as his father’s generation of uptown Bengali immigrants died away and vanished from memory.
Dishwasher Dreams is a part of the New American Voices Project
The event is free and open to all.
Venue:
Queens Theatre
Flushing Meadows Corona Park
14 United Nations Avenue South
Queens, NY 11368
Aladdin faces his big break as an actor; auditioning to play a terrorist in a major Hollywood movie. As he prepares for his audition, Aladdin finds himself thinking back on his deceased father who left Bangladesh in 1947 for a better life in America, and his parents’ determination to raise him Muslim in the housing projects of Spanish Harlem. Accompanied by live tabla music and video projections, Aladdin takes us on a hilarious and moving journey through the world of immigration, race, identity, family, graffiti, the Yankees, and the nature of the American dream.