Here’s the wrong way to begin a blog:  I don’t like blogs.  I prefer to talk about myself in another way… the slant way, as the poet Emily Dickenson advised. Lately I’ve been thinking that writing plays is a way to tell the truth in a “slant” way.

I once interviewed the playwright, Edward Albee, nervously, sitting in his apartment in what was then known as the “butter and eggs” district of New York while his cat climbed up my legs and put snags in my pantyhose. But I managed to catch him say:  I never let facts get in the way of truth.

It turned out to be one of those lines which, thankfully, the leaky pot known as my memory, has managed to hold on to ever since.

I keep turning the question over and over in my mind:  what is the relationship of facts to truth?

We get our facts and our “truth” from journalists, lately from comedians like Jon Stewart, from pundits, from blogs.  Traditionally, in Iran, they look to their poets to tell them the truth. They believe poetry can get at a deeper level than history and politics.

… I wrote a play about poetry, politics, memory and the country of Iran… not because I’m an expert on any of these things… but because poetry and Iran – and our political history with Iran – were/are in the news so much… I felt as if I was having pebbles thrown at my window asking me to wake up and write about it, write about myself, my experience of living in Iran many years ago, Iran’s poetic soul, my own love of poetry – use it all… tell the truth, but as Emily Dickenson says, tell it slant.

And how lucky I am to be able to work on it at the Salt Lake Acting Company.

 

THE PERSIAN QUARTER plays February 2-27, 2011.  Tickets available online or by calling the Box Office: 801.363.7522.