"Servicing Their Country
Women on the rack, from Sacramento to Istanbul
by STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS
Sinan Unel is an expat Turkish playwright who named his 1998 drama, Pera Palas, after Istanbul’s most distinguished hotel — where most of the play’s action occurs — a symbolic and luxurious edifice opened in 1891 to accommodate passengers from Paris arriving at the final stop of the Orient Express. The hotel’s guest list has included European royalty, Agatha Christie, Jackie O. and the father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. It’s rumored that the constitutional tenets of contemporary Turkey were drawn up in Room 101, where Ataturk secretly resided when his family was under surveillance by the Allied forces of World War I. The place is swirling with ghosts, as is Unel’s play."
More:LA Weekly: Theater: Servicing Their Country
