THE STORY: Pervez is a cab driver. He’s also on the run from the FBI. While driving home yesterday, he discovered Bureau agents ransacking his house. Pervez just kept on driving; he knew they were looking for his brother, Nawaz. For the past twenty-four hours, he has been hiding out in his cab outside Port Authority. There, he will meet a Christian missionary and a homeless man, both searching for a connection from a world in which they feel alienated.
“New York cab rides often make strange political bedfellows, as the opening scene of Mike Batistick’s PORT AUTHORITY THROW DOWN illustrates. The angry dark-skinned taxi driver is a Pakistani man [Pervez] sick and tired of being mistaken for an Arab. The meek fair-skinned passenger is a woman from Akron, Ohio, working as a Christian missionary in the city. He announces that he has a bomb, then says he was just joking, 'letting out some aggression.' She suggests that people like him take their aggression and misguided views 'back to their kingdom.' Then he asks her out, and she gives him a portable Bible…Pervez is under more stress than usual, since federal authorities broke into his house four days ago and arrested his brother, Nawaz, apparently without explanation. Now Pervez has to do Nawaz’s job too, selling newspapers at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. There he meets Nate, an alcoholic homeless African-American who had befriended Nawaz. Before Pervez learns that, however, he is suspicious of Nate, who asks, 'Why’d you think I was going to take something from you?' Pervez answers, 'Various reasons'…PORT AUTHORITY THROW DOWN sets its story in an atmosphere of intercultural fear and distrust, then pushes its characters in the direction of intercultural cooperation and support. Some of them have a long way to go…[Its] battered heart is in the right place.” —The New York Times.
“Batistick has the valuable ability to articulate the concerns of the working poor through witty, bitter, nihilistic banter. His Pervez is completely believable and utterly likable, especially when paired with the hilariously parochial Barb.” —Backstage.
