Port Authority Throw Down

Teatro Paraguas continues its 12th season with Mike Batistick’s 2006 play Port Authority Throw Down. Directed by Rick Vargas, the play is set in Fall 2003 at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City, and focuses on the lives of two college-educated Pakistani immigrant brothers selling newspapers and driving a taxi to make ends meet. One brother, Navaz (A.J. Goldman) has been detained by the FBI, but appears as a presence throughout the play. The other brother, Pervez (Daric Gutierrez), attempts to sell newspapers in Nawaz’s absence while keeping a low profile, and deal with Nate, a homeless black man (Joshua Wells) who claims the near-by pay phone as his turf. The fourth character is Barb (Rose Corrigan), an evangelical missionary from Akron whose inability to give away a certain quota of Bibles each day leads her to question her faith and zeal.

The play deals with issues of immigration, Islam, Homeland Security, homelessness, cultural identity, and terrorism though the lens of four marginalized and vulnerable individuals who find the ability to trust each other in spite of the precariousness and poverty of their lives. Although the play is somewhat outside of Teatro Paraguas’ mission, it presents a situation that could be happening practically anywhere around the world, including here in New Mexico, as political, economic,and social upheavals are forcing million of refugees to search for a better life.

The play’s grim portrait is not without humor, as the characters’ awkward and clumsy attempts at communication and trust highlight their quirky idiosyncrasies. While the stakes are high, the characters are all too human in their attempts to stay afloat in their world.

Port Authority Throwdown was presented as part of the American Living Room series at HERE Arts Center in Manhattan in July 2003,and again at the Ars Nova Theatre in New York inMarch 2004. The premiere production took pace in New York at the Culture Project in 2006 in partnership with Working Theater.

Mike Batistick is the author of three critically-acclaimed Off-Broadway plays: Chicken, Port Authority Throw Down and Ponies. Ponies was designated as a New York Times Critics Pick when it was released as a film in 2012. In television, he has written for FX’s The Americans and Dick Wolf’s Chicago PD on NBC. His original pilot We Counted Your Knives is currently in development with USA Network.