New Iranian Plays

Introduced by Farindokht Zahedi, Associate Professor, College of Fine Arts / Theater / Faculty of Performing Arts and Music, University of Tehran. Editors Aubrey Mellor and Cheryl Robson. A wide-ranging collection of plays from new and established voices from today's Iran and the global Iranian diaspora. Plays cover life in contemporary Iran, the hopes of women finding new ways to assert their individuality in a time of great of upheaval, the lives of those trapped in a migrant camp and the need to challenge stereotypical views. The plays shine a light on a rapidly changing Iran, one that is vastly different from the misconceptions outsiders have of it. Includes: A Moment of Silence by Mohammad Yaghoubi - (Iran) Home by Naghmeh Samini - (Iran) Shame by Sholeh Wolpe -(Iran-USA) Manus by Leila Hekmatnia (Iran), Keyvan Sarreshteh (Iran), Nazanin Sahamizadeh (Australia) Isfahan Blues Torange Yeghiazarian - (Iran-USA) Editors: Aubrey Mellor Aubrey is a leading Australian Theatre Director. Currently Senior Fellow at LASALLE, in Singapore, he was the first Australian to study Asian writing. Formerly Director of the Australian National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), he is well-known as an acting teacher to a generation of acclaimed Australian actors. He has directed for all major companies, commissioned and premiered plays by Australia's leading playwrights and is a leading proponent of new Australian writing. Aubrey founded several writing awards for playwrights and is an advisor to arts bodies including the Performing Arts Board of The Australia Council and The Australian National Playwright's Conference. Awards include the OAM in 1992, the Australian Writer's Guild's Dorothy Crawford Award for services to Playwriting and the International Theatre Institute's Uchimura Prize for best production, Tokyo International Festival. Cheryl Robson Cheryl has edited several collections of international drama. After studying drama at Bristol University, she worked for the BBC and as a film lecturer. She founded the Virginia Prize for Fiction in 2009 in the UK. She is an award-winning playwright who has received Arts Council UK commission and option awards and had several plays produced. She ran a theatre company for several years in London, developing and producing international plays by women. She has won numerous awards for her filmmaking and was recently named a finalist in the ITV National Diversity awards - Lifetime Achievement. .

Author: Nazanin Sahamizadeh, Torange Yeghiazarian, Sholeh Wolpe
Publisher: Aurora Metro Books
Published: 05/17/2022
Pages: 330
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 5.75h x 8.19w x 0.79d
ISBN: 9781912430475

About the Author
Yeghiazarian, Torange: - Torange Yeghiazarian founded Golden Thread in 1996 where she launched such visionary programs as ReOrient Festival & Forum, Middle East America (in partnership with the Lark and Silkroad Rising), Islam 101 (with Hafiz Karmali), New Threads, and the Fairytale Players. Torange's plays include ISFAHAN BLUES, 444 DAYS, THE FIFTH STRING: ZIRYAB'S PASSAGE TO CORDOBA, and CALL ME MEHDI. Awards include the Gerbode-Hewlett Playwright Commission Award (ISFAHAN BLUES) and a commission by the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California (THE FIFTH STRING). Her short play CALL ME MEHDI is published in the anthology "Salaam. Peace: An Anthology of Middle Eastern-American Drama," TCG 2009. She adapted the poem, I SELL SOULS by Simin Behbehani to the stage, and directed the premieres of OUR ENEMIES: LIVELY SCENES OF LOVE AND COMBAT and SCENIC ROUTES by Yussef El Guindi, THE MYTH OF CREATION by Sadegh Hedayat, TAMAM by Betty Shamieh, STUCK by Amir Al-Azraki and VOICE ROOM by Reza Soroor, amongst others. Her articles on contemporary theatre in Iran have been published in The Drama Review (2012), American Theatre Magazine (2010), and Theatre Bay Area Magazine (2010), and HowlRound. Torange has contributed to the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures and Cambridge World Encyclopedia of Stage Actors. Born in Iran and of Armenian heritage, Torange holds a Master's degree in Theatre Arts from San Francisco State University. Torange has been recognized by Theatre Bay Area and is one of Theatre Communication Group's Legacy Leaders of Color. She was honored by the Cairo International Theatre Festival (2016) and the Symposium on Equity in the Entertainment Industry (2017).Wolpe, Sholeh: - Sholeh Wolpé is an Iranian-born poet, playwright and literary translator. Her performances, solo or in collaboration with musicians and artists, have been hailed by audiences as mesmerizing. Named a "2020-2021 Cultural Trailblazer" by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Sholeh is the recipient of a 2014 PEN Heim, 2013 Midwest Book Award and 2010 Lois Roth Persian Translation prize, as well as artist fellowship and residencies in the U.S., Mexico, Spain, Australia and Switzerland. Her plays have been finalists and semifinalists at at Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, Centenary Stage Women Playwrights, Ojai Playwrights Festival, and Ashland New Plays Festival. Sholeh 's literary work includes five collections of poetry, several plays, three books of translations, and three anthologies. Her most recent publications include The Conference of the Birds (W.W. Norton & Co), Cómo escribir una canción de amor (Olifante Ediciones de Poesia, Spain), and Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths (University of Arkansas Press.) Sholeh has performed her literary work with world-renowned musicians at Quincy Jones Presents series on The Broad Stage, Skirball Cultural Center Series, Los Angeles Aloud, The Broad Museum, LA County Museum of Art Ahmanson stage, Singapore Literature Festival, UNSW School of Arts and Media theater, and other venues. Her libretto for a new oratorio, The Conference of the Birds, composed by Fahad Siadat and choreographed by Andre Megerdichian will premiere in Los Angeles in 2022. Sholeh Wolpe travels internationally as a performing poet, writer and public speaker. She has also taught at UCLA-- where she was the inaugural Writer-in-Residence in 2018-- as well as University of Maine's Stonecoast MFA program in the United States. She has lived in Iran, Trinidad and the UK, and presently lives in Los Angeles with her husband, sociologist Edward Telles. Sholeh is presently a Writer-in-Residence at University of California, Irvine.Samini, Nagmeh: - Naghmeh Samini (PhD), playwright, scriptwriter and lecturer in Dramatic Arts, was born in Iran and received her BA in Drama and MA in Cinema from the University of Tehran. She did her PhD in Art Studies at the University of Tarbiat Modarres in Tehran with a thesis focused on Drama and Mythology. More than twenty of her plays have been staged in Iran, France, India, Canada, the United States and other countries. These include Sleeping in an Empty Cup, Sky Horses Rain Ashes, Making Faces and The Home. Her screenplays, including Main Line and Heiran and 3 women won awards. In 2007 critics selected her as one of the five top playwrights in Iran. Her plays are experimental in structure and handle a variety of topical subjects at personal and sociopolitical levels. Inspired by One Thousand and One Night, she uses magic realism and non-linear narratives in her plays. One of her recent plays entitled The King and the Mathematician: A Legend(2012) was selected by UNESCO as one of the cultural achievements of the year. Naghmeh has been Assistant Professor/Lecturer in Dramatic Literature at the Faculty of Music and Performing Arts, University of Tehran, since 2005. She was also affiliated with the School of Drama, University of Washington between 2012 and 2017. She has run several creative writing and drama workshops in Iran and abroad. As a researcher, she has several publications among which the most important ones are two books: one about One Thousand and One night entitled The Book of Love and Magic (Tehran: Markaz, 2000) and the other which is focused on reflections of Iranian Mythology in Iranian drama is entitled The Theatre of Myths (Tehran: Ney, 2008). The latter book won the awards of 'the best book of the year' in Iran in 2010. She has recently submitted her manuscript for a monograph entitled Battles and Bodies (Tehran: Ney, forthcoming 2019) on the semiotics of human body in post-war Japanese cinema. Nagmeh has published numerous articles and delivered lectures on cinema, theatre and cultural studies in Persian and English. Her most recent lecture delivered in Stanford University was entitled 'Feminine body and Feminine Mind in Iranian Cinema. Naghmeh has won several scholarships and bursaries for her creative writing and research projects from Japan Foundation, Aschberg UNESCO and other cultural organisations.
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