As a playwright
Reza Shirmarz, 2014, Athens, Greece
Reza Shirmarz started writing realistic plays such as Cinnamon Stars, Crystal Vines, and The Lanterns Are Weeping to present his sociopolitical views on the status quo. However, those plays have provided the director with the possibility of performing them in non-realistic ways. It took almost a decade for the trilogy mentioned above to be written. It contains characters that go through an evolutionary process from the inception to the completion of each dramatic work. Each part of the trilogy covers a specific period of post-revolutionary Iran. It is paramount to mention that antirealism shows up more in the last part, i.e. The Lantern Are Weeping, where a writer’s blood turns green. This change of blood color goes viral in the media and creates a harsh condition for him and other related characters while the whole country is going through a sociopolitical movement called the “Green Movement”. Despite the realistic justification of this unrealistic situation, the change of blood color appears to be impossible at first glance and in the eye of the readers or the spectators. This antirealistic tendency grows stronger gradually in Shirmarz’s playwriting and becomes an important milestone in his recent plays such as Deep Blue See, The Corners of Death, etc.
"Playwriting is like breathing to me. Sometimes I try to let it go and stop writing plays but every time it comes back to me and a new play is born, like it's a part of my nature and I've grown to love it over the last two decades."
Full-Length & One-Act Plays
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Cinnamon stars
A short summary: A well-known outstanding scientist happens to discover that the imported milk from Chernobyl contains radioactive rays which could have pernicious effects on Iranian children and grown-ups who consume milk or any sort of milk product. He publishes an article making the issue public with the assistance of one of his PhD students and faces serious political and social repercussions. The governmental authorities who are the mafia behind the import of milk, react severely to his outspokenness and he loses eventually everything he has including his job as an instructor at the university. His family members react in different ways to his brutal honesty and radical candor putting their future lives in danger. The government claims the ownership of his house and cuts his pension with the assistance of one of its agents. In the 2nd half the play, the scientist loses his eyesight due to a nervous breakdown and goes totally blind. Now the desperate family needs to move and reside another place… About the play: Cinnamon Stars is the 1st part of the trilogy which was celebrated as the best play in the playwriting competition of the 26th Fajr International Theater Festival in 2007. It was published in the same year by the publishing house of Iran’s Performing Arts Center on a national scale. Crystal vines
A short summary: A sick old farmer lives with his wife, a former feminist activist, in a vineyard dying of drought. He struggles to keep his vines alive as well as to survive on in spite of their worsening financial situation. His wife has endeavored for a long time to stay away from her agonizing past experiences in the political milieu, but an old lovesick colleague who has come to live in her neighborhood since the outset of her self-exile, keeps reminding her of the old days every time he gets a chance, despite her nonstop crusades against his vain endeavors to revive their ancient romantic affairs. The lovelorn neighbor sues the farmer for the illegal overuse of water and his losses. He wants to get rid of him in order to have his beloved woman, but before the court session the farmer dies along with his vineyard and his wife leaves overnight the village leaving her passionate lover all alone with the wasteland has claimed the ownership based on the court’s decision… Here is a part of her monologue (from Isaiah 5, The Song of the Vineyard) standing all broken over the dead body of her husband: “I will sing for the one I loved, a song about his vineyard. My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside. He dug it up and cleared it of stores and planted it with choices vines. He built a watchtower in it and cut out a winepress as well. Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yields only bad fruit. Now you, dwellers in Jerusalem, and men of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more could have been done for my vineyard than I have done for it? Why did it yield only bad? Now I will tell you what I am going to do to my vineyard: I will take away its hedge, and it will be destroyed; I will break down its wall, and it will be trampled. I will make it a wasteland, neither pruned nor cultivated, and briers and thorns will grow there. I will command the clouds not to rain on it.” About the play: Crystal Vines is the 2nd part of the trilogy which was celebrated as the best play in the playwriting competition of the 27th Fajr International Theater Festival in 2008. It was published as a part of the event in the same year by the publishing house of Iran’s Performing Arts Center on a national scale. The lanterns are weeping
A short summary: An Iranian family, a writer and his wife, endeavor to survive in the middle of the reformist Green Movement in Iran in 2009 during which thousands of people were arrested or killed. The younger sister of the writer’s wife who lives with them gets involved in the political movement puts the family in serious danger, the writer disappears in the middle of the day, arrested by the governmental secret agents for certain investigations. Finally, when they release him to get back home, the dead body of the sister is found among the demonstrators shot by an anonymous soldier… Here is a part of the writer’s last dialogues: “We’re exiled to nowhere but our selves. They have built walls around us, those we never saw and knew… they didn’t burn our houses or books, they got closer step by step, from all directions, and locked us up in our selves… Every one of us changed into an island so keyed up of vicious waves… an island drowning little by little. They exiled us to our selves… they exiled us to our selves… ” About the play: The Lanterns are Weeping, the 3rd part of the trilogy, was written years after the playwright migrated to Greece and has not been published or performed yet. Deep blue sea
A short summary: A summer day at a sandy quiet beach. A swimming coach falls heads over heels in love with a blind poetess. Before he gives his love to her, the girl drowns while swimming around the beach. The coach who finds her body and lets her family know about the tragedy, experiences a deeply sad time afterwards. He gets closer to her and starts teaching her how to swim in his imagination and prevents her from drowning. They get to know each other better and gradually fall in love. They forge an emotional bond, but the girl drowns while swimming alone… About the play: Deep Blue Sea is one-act play which was written and published in a literary magazine called Payab in Tehran in 2010. This play has been performed a couple of times in different cities and theater festivals in Iran. The Iranian classical guitarist and composer, Jamal Zohurian, made a song based on Deep Blue Sea for classical guitar which is published in a collection called Peace in 2018. Acharnon street vulture
A short summary: This full-length play focuses on the relationship of an Afghan refugee with a Greek family. He is in a relationship with a Greek girl, concurrently has to grapple with the issues of being an undocumented immigrant. What’s more is that the Greek family still suffers from wounds of military dictatorship (known as Greek junta) in Greece. At the end of the play, a profound feeling of sympathy and empathy brings the young couple together after they broke up… About the play: Acharnon Street Vulture is a full-length play written in 2014 in Greece. This play has been performed a couple of times in different cities and theater festivals in Iran. It was going to be performed in Fajr International Theater Festival in 2015, but the festival did not take place due to financial crisis. Here is a part of a long review in 2012 by an Iranian critic: “Acharnon Street Vulture is a play which, beyond its dramatic layers, has got a floating external layer and at the same time, constructs its stories easily for its audience. The brilliance of the play comes from the dexterous selection of a number of simple dramatic situations in order to reveal the past and future of the characters. The audience grasps multiple interconnected stories from two different worlds, Iraq and Greece.” Immigrants
A short summary:
Running approximately 80 minutes, Immigrants is about a documented African black (a former child soldier) and an undocumented white from Iran (a former black comedian), who are trying to survive in a very harsh situation in today’s Greece. They sleep in two old caskets -the main set design- in a carpenter’s warehouse where the former comedian works. The African is a new guest beaten by the anti-immigrant fascists in the ghetto of Athens because of his small robberies and saved accidentally by the Iranian and his girlfriend, a Greek cabaret singer. Immigrants is a black comedy. It cultivates the problems through which immigrants and refugees go searching for a better life. This is the image of a plethora of expatriates who risk their lives and end up in irreversible ramifications. Here are some of the ending dialogues: “I picked these clocks up just to feast my eyes on... came across them one by one at different places… at the corners of streets… in dustbins… and I bought some of them from thrift shops… kinda like ‘em a lot… they don’t run at all, they don’t show you anything, they’re like dead still bodies… like us.” About the play: Immigrants is a one-act play written in 2014 in Greece. This play has been translated into Greek a couple of years ago. The corners of death
A short summary: A dead body comes back to life for a while and remembers some dreamlike parts of his life. He finds himself in an abandoned island with only a dried broken tree. There is also a horsefly to which the person speaks, although does not see it, only hears it buzzing. He finds nothing to eat but some stiff piece of bread beside some human bones which are buried under the tree. He also finds a piggyback with random belongings inside it. Through a chain of memories and dreams, the person realizes step by step that he is dead and those bones belong to himself… About the play: The Corners of Death is a roughly 60-minute monologue made of four interdependent episodes: The Corners of Death, Lady in Red, Colonel and Dark of the Moon. The characters in each episode are interconnected to other characters in other episodes and each new episode is supplementary part of the previous one. This monologue was written in 2013 in Greece. muzzled
Muzzled, Shirmarz’s response to Beckett's Catastrophe which was written in support of Vaclav Havel imprisoned by the authorities for his outspoken plays, is published in Index On Censorship for the first time. Click to read his interview and the play: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03064220211068702 |
Other Plays
My Hands
Orestes
Meeting
Yellow Snow Falls
Plays in development
The Songless Birds
Tsunami
Limbo
Pericles
The Lost Pipe
My Hands
Orestes
Meeting
Yellow Snow Falls
Plays in development
The Songless Birds
Tsunami
Limbo
Pericles
The Lost Pipe
More than three decades after Index published the celebrated playwright’s work dedicated to the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, censored Iranian writer Reza Shirmarz has responded with his own play, Muzzled.
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