Matryoshka

Continuing this season’s trend of women getting tied to chairs in storefront theaters, Gregory Peters’s limp new reimagining of One Thousand and One Nights has a woman, Sherry, escaping death by telling stories. The original story of Scheherazade works because there’s an air of fantasy that makes it possible to believe she could prevent her death with captivating narratives. Switching to a contemporary setting where the killer ties women up before cutting off their appendages makes the plot impossible to swallow, especially when Sherry’s tales are as lousy as these.