Urbanite drama looks at parallel lives in Victorian and modern eras

Tillie is a 17-year-old girl living in Ipswich, England, in 1840. She feels that there are no men her age worth marrying in her town, so she travels to India looking for a husband. She ends up marrying an officer of the British Raj.

Samira is a 17-year-old pioneer girl in Ipswich exactly 175 years later, in 2015. She yearns to escape her dreary existence and marry an ISIS fighter. She ends up being a jihadist in Syria.

Tillie and Samira are the central characters in “Echoes,” which gets it regional premiere starting this weekend at Urbanite Theatre in Sarasota.

The powerful drama comes from Henry Naylor, who made his name writing comedy.

“He’s well-known in England actually for being a comedy writer,” said Brendan Ragan, one of Urbanite’s two artistic directors and the director of this production. “But he wrote this trilogy of plays that all deal with the Middle East in one way or another, that he calls his Arabian Nightmares.”

“Echoes,” from 2015, is the second of the three “Nightmares.” All three — the first is titled “The Collector” and the third “Angel” — premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. “Echoes” won the Spirit of the Fringe Award, one of the festival’s top honors, and the next year it became one of the most highly awarded plays in the history of the Adelaide Fringe Festival. Adelaide is the second-largest fringe festival in the world, behind Edinburgh.

The Urbanite production is only the third staging of “Echoes” in the United States. The others have been in New York City.

Tillie and Samira never interact in the play. They take turns addressing the audience directly, each telling her own story and occasionally becoming the other characters that they encounter. Despite the nearly two centuries between their births, their lives run parallel in surprising ways that became evident as the play unfolds.

Among the parallels, Ragan said, is that both imagine that there is glory in war, and both naively submit to their male-dominated culture and end up gradually discovering its brutality.

“They’re young enough not to know better at the beginning,” Ragan said.

The play’s examination of the debilitating effect of a male-dominated society looks at it partly from a historical perspective, but it couldn’t be more immediate, with revelations of sexual improprieties bringing down major national figures nearly every day.

Urbanite has planned the show for months, and it’s only by coincidence that it coincides with headlines about the issues the play examines.

“We are doing it at a perfect time,” he said. “I wish I could say we were that prescient.”

Details: Nov. 17-Dec. 17, Urbanite Theatre, 1487 Second St., Sarasota. 8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m. Sunday. No performances Nov. 23-24. $29; under 40 (with ID) $20; students (with ID) $5. 941-321-1397, urbanitetheatre.com.

This story was originally published November 15, 2017 at 2:35 PM with the headline "Urbanite drama looks at parallel lives in Victorian and modern eras."