SLAC’s In The Room Conversation with THE PERSIAN QUARTER’s Playwright Kathleen Cahill and Director Alexandra Harbold.

KATHLEEN. What was I doing writing this play?  You stand at the mirror and look at yourself, and you can assess yourself, and you can assess your appearance, but you can’t see what’s inside – you can’t see what’s inside yourself.  This play is actually trying to look inside myself.  To look at an experience that I had 35 years ago.  When I was 22, I went overland to Iran for adventure and to teach English.  I didn’t know anything about Iran.  Nothing.  Zero. I didn’t even know how to count to ten in their language. I remember I was taking the train from Istanbul to Iran, and there were Muslims on the train who unrolled their carpets five times a day and prayed to Mecca; I had never seen that before – I had never even heard of Mecca.  One of them taught me to count to ten in Farsi, which I still remember.  So I arrived in Tehran, and then I took an airplane to Shiraz and a taxi from the airport, and I cannot tell you – it was like arriving on another planet.  It’s a different year because they count the calendar from Mohammed not from Jesus, so it’s seven hundred years earlier; the days of the week are different – the Holy day isn’t Sunday, it’s Friday – Jomai – so it’s a six day week with Friday off, so those two things, just to begin with, threw me.  Then I was wearing this little light Sunday dress with a little short skirt, and there were these tribal women around where the taxi dropped me off, and they started doing that yuyulating thing with their voices – because of my skirt.  So it was all quite astonishing, and that was my introduction to Iran.

I lived there for ten months, and a lot of things happened, and I saw a lot of things, but I didn’t understand what I was seeing because I was uninformed and naïve.  But I never forgot the experience, and when the elections came up in the news in 2009, and I saw the women in the streets protesting, I just thought, “What is this about, and what happened to me then, and how do those things connect over 35 years?”  So I started to think about it, and I started to read a lot, and it was amazing because a lot of memories – and I know this is true of every other person – you think you have forgotten, but if you start thinking back, it will come.  More and more memories come.  The language came back – I remembered sentences – like I remembered how to say, “So and so is amusing us.” (Laughter) Memories, memories, memories started to come back, and I tied those memories to what I was learning from my reading.  I was also understanding things for the first time that I did not understand thirty-five years ago, and out of that came THE PERSIAN QUARTER.

How long were you there?

KATHLEEN. Ten months.  And at the time, they were our number 1 allies in the Middle East.  We allowed the Shah in Iran to buy as many weapons as he wanted, and he wanted a lot of them.  So being Western was the ‘in’ thing; everyone wanted to be and had to be to please the authorities.  The women used to wear miniskirts with transparent chadors. That was in ’76.  Then the Iranian Revolution comes, and everything changes.  And I started to notice that the young students who were interested in politics, who felt like this American dominance of their culture wasn’t right were starting to put on chadors as an act of rebellion.  Wearing a chador actually became a sign of independence.  Then.  It became something else, but that’s what it was then.

ANDRA. THE PERSIAN QUARTER is about crisis of recognition, crisis of understanding.  The 1979 Hostage Crisis is also called the Diplomatic Crisis – and because Kathleen has me obsessed with the elasticity of language, I started wondering about the word crisis and how the difference in naming the event transforms the perspective.  In the Greek, krisis means the turning point in a disease.  And that felt really right to me.  It implies that fevered state and then that moment when or that possibility that the fever might break.  And that we come to that moment of recognition, that turning point, through turmoil, through struggle. We’re often not put in those moments of recognition if the status quo continues.  The sense of patriotism is equally strong in Ann and Shirin, but it’s a totally different beast.  What that means.  Having someone else quote our nation’s history back at you as an outside observer is very different than having another American speak to you.  Perhaps because there’s a shared complicity because of our shared past.   When someone from another country criticizes your country, it’s interesting what fires in your system.  And there’s that crisis of recognition.   

 

We become foreigners through the play.   In the first act of the play, we are dropped into Iran, and we are foreigners as much as Ann and Mike are.  And Ann and Mike have very different ways of dealing with being foreigners.  There’s that one sense of being like tissue paper and absorbing everything ~ and it colors your life and your mind forever after.  And there’s that part where your identity is about what’s familiar and known, and that pulls closer and tighter, and I think that narrowing is what Ann fights – where it feels like you can’t absorb anything because it threatens that core sense of identity.  That crisis of recognition, that crisis of understanding, feels like the core of the play to me.  And then you have Rumi, who keeps pointing to, “Yes, from this perspective this is the picture, but what happens if you change your perspective?”  And that’s what feels magical about THE PERSIAN QUARTER for me – it contains political and historical realities, but then you’ve constantly got Rumi saying, “Why don’t you look at it from here?”

 

KATHLEEN. For Iranians, poetry is very much woven into their daily lives.  They name their supermarkets after poets.  They name their hospitals after poets.  A friend of mine when I lived in Iran 35 years ago worked for a family planning organization in Tehran, and instead of memos, the doctors were writing poems.  They were publishing pamphlets that were poems.  I can’t even explain what poetry is there.  I can’t even explain what poetry is there.  On a high plane, it’s a recognition that there is another reality than this daily life thing.  There’s a higher ether all around us, and they’re recognizing that all the time – from the most mundane rhyming couplet all the way to Rumi.  Rumi is like Buddha.  Rumi tells you how to live; he keeps reminding you that there’s another plane of existence where this mishigas stuff (laughing) disappears – it just doesn’t exist.  It’s immaterial.  So Rumi’s in the play to represent that spirit in Iran of poetry, which is there all the time.  It’s the common language in a way of all Iranians.  And that’s something you never hear about in the news.  Nobody ever talks about that mentality that has this poetic spiritual quality to it all of the time.  In an ordinary way.  It’s there in ordinary life.  It’s in the daily life, and that’s why Rumi is in the play.

So when you talked about hearing about the elections and reading, was it about politics or culture.  Where did you start?

KATHLEEN. Actually, I started back with a book called All the Shah’s Men (Stephen Kinzer), which is about how we, the United States, overthrew the only democratically elected Prime Minister that Iran has ever had.   I remember hearing about that when I was in Iran, and I also remember hearing about what the CIA did.  The Shah had a twin sister who apparently showed up with this fur coat lined with money to give out in the bazaar to get people to rise up against Mosaddegh.  I heard these stories, and I thought, no, that can’t be true.  It’s just impossible – that can’t be true.  But this book, All the Shah’s Men, is about how that was true.  

Mosaddegh is a very important person, and we don’t even know his name.  He was on the cover of TIME Magazine in 1952 as Man of the Year, and then we proceeded to overthrow him.  So I read about that.  And then I saw the Iranian women taking to the streets in protest and risking their lives.  I read some fabulous biographies of older women going back to the days of the harem.  So I started with the politics, and then I went back into the social history.

 

I was thinking about writing this play, and whenever I’m thinking about writing a play, I have to have the universe speak to me.  I was in the Sweet Library, and I saw a sign for the Rumi Poetry Club, and it was like (in an awed whisper), “That’s there for me.” (Laughter) And then I was in Los Angeles walking on the beach with my husband, and I saw a spray-painted sign that said RUMI LIVES.  And I thought, Oh God, this is really the universe talking to me.

ANDRA. What I love about Kathleen’s work is that you get immersed in what’s really beautiful about the Persian culture, the Iranian culture.  It’s your gateway in.  It changes your state of mind.  It’s so vivid.  What we hear on the news gets us so blinkered and unable to see another culture beyond conflict.  You immediately get transported through Kathleen’s writing.  And then it gets mixed up with history and politics.  But you end up with this sort of longing for language, a longing for music and saturated experience that isn’t naturalistic, and then you get the humor of the play that subverts your expectation – whatever you think is around the corner isn’t what’s around the corner.  I keep thinking immersion and inversion.  Dunk you in and turn the world upside down.  The play, Kathleen’s writing, change your inner state.

What about the whole generational question in the play – particularly the mothers and daughters?  The American daughter 30 years later – so real, so true.  Could you speak to that choice?

KATHLEEN. I was being a little bit harsh, but I think it’s also true.  I feel like our culture is becoming even more brutalized.  The mother was a true believer.  She was a patriot.  She was religious – an ex-nun.  Although she has in her the feminist desire to be her own woman, so she was an ex-nun.  Then the daughter believes in her career – and almost nothing else – she doesn’t know any history, doesn’t know any poetry.  And I feel like that’s the case; I feel like that is what’s happening to our culture.  I was watching Wynton Marsalis on 60 Minutes last night, and he was saying the same thing.

So Ann didn’t pass it on?

KATHLEEN. No, because Ann was seriously wounded.  It’s implied that there’s not a good relationship; she didn’t pass that on.  And the daughter has rejected that, and said, that was you, not me.  What the culture then gives a person like that is go and pursue your career, and that’s all.  It’s an empty kind of existence… And that’s what’s going on.

ANDRA. There’s a secret underneath the scene with the daughters.  There is a legacy.  Something really amazing happens at the end of that with seeing Rumi through the lens.  Reading more and listening to more about Rumi, that sense that transformation happening so quickly.  When Coleman Barks speaks about Rumi, he does talk about slow growth, but there’s also the encounter that suddenly shifts everything in a moment.  And that feels like part of the play, too.

KATHLEEN. But also at the end of the play, what Rumi represents is this other existence, and that is there, whether you know it or not, it’s always there.

What style is this play?

ANDRA. It has so many elements – that’s part of the whole subversion of expectation thing…  It is mystical.  It is a visceral play.  All of your senses get hit.  That’s where the magic comes from – loving this existence.  It is supersaturated experience.  (to Kathleen) And because you always write from the body to me, the physical language jumps out of naturalism.  The Rumi poems bring all of these metaphors into play.  There is a metaphorical and naturalistic way of moving in this world…

The whirling is at the heart of the play for me.

Could you talk a little bit more about what that is?

ANDRA. Tapping into the Sufi tradition – Rumi lost one of his best friends, his soul mate.  When he heard of his friend’s murder, he began circling a pillar and speaking out poems in his grief.  According to what I’ve read, his students then began to write them down.  That became the root of the Whirling Dervish tradition.  It’s whirling into transcendence.

KATHLEEN. When I was in Istanbul in the spring, I went to see the Whirling Dervishes.  They recognize Rumi, too.  There were children in the audience who fell asleep because it is a meditation and they get into this state by whirling.  And actually, when they tried to found modern Turkey, it was banned because (laughing) they didn’t want them in that transcendent state while they’re trying to found modern Turkey.

It is like watching a top spin, you do become mesmerized by how long they can do it.

ANDRA. There is a really beautiful program on NPR’s Speaking of Faith/On Being, The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi, talking about whirling as a way of staying centered while moving.  Our world is moving so fast.

KATHLEEN. So our audience is going to be invited to whirl.  (Laughing. Laughter)

ANDRA. We were thinking of Rumi in the men’s restroom at the intermission.

KATHLEEN (Laughing) Yes.  There he is.

How has the play changed since you had the reading during CHARM?  How has it evolved for you or what is that revising process?

KATHLEEN. It’s changed.  Here’s this play that hadn’t had a workshop or anything, and you said you wanted to produce it – which was thrilling – and it’s really important to hear your play.  With CHARM, I had four workshops with different places around the country before it came here for the World Premiere.  It had really been worked on.  I think when you produce a new play that hasn’t been heard, it has to be heard.  I just needed to keep hearing it.  And it changed.  In some ways a lot and in some ways not a lot.  Both.

Small changes for big effect.

Even after that initial reading with the public.  There were mega changes.  It was fascinating to begin with, but I felt you really dug into the core of what the story was after that.

ANDRA. And Rumi.

KATHLEEN. Yes.  This thing about hearing it – if you do a new play again, I’d just like to build that in because --  a play exists in your ear.  You have to hear it.  I could read it over a zillion times and not know what to do until I hear it.   Actors do that.

It was nice also to have the actors on board for that length of time – to have them committed – so that each shift that you made, they could adjust and go with that.

KATHLEEN. Yes, that was a blessing.  I think it was maybe a little hard on them, but it was crucial for the play.

And Andra, you’ve been living with this play for a long time.  Can you talk a little bit about that?

ANDRA. I received a quote in an email the other day by Charles Dickens, that I sent on to Kathleen.

KATHLEEN. It’s so great.

ANDRA. “The whole difference between construction and creation is this; that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.” I feel like I’ve been in love with this play for so long, and now we get to build it ourside of our heads.  It has been a gift to have our company for so long, because it feels like there’s a real wisdom – even in running into walls. It feels like time is a current in THE PERSIAN QUARTER.  Rumi gets us into the water and we move through time with him.  I love how physical it is.

THE PERSIAN QUARTER explores the experience of freedom.  That word doesn’t seem sufficient, somehow.  It doesn’t get at the essence of itself – perhaps because we use that word so often in our culture – abstractly, ideologically.  But looking at freedom from the perspective of repression and captivity within the play, something shifts.  THE PERSIAN QUARTER captures that sense of constriction in your lungs, in your body, of being unable to move and then of freedom which feels like this wild taste on your tongue – for Azadeh – or for Ann, the memory of apple pie and blue sky – there’s this appetite for freedom that the play gets at.  That’s what I really love about it.  It makes me recognize my own freedom in a very different way.

KATHLEEN. There’s a poem I read a long long time ago and just never forgot called Things I Didn’t Know I Loved by Nazim Hikmet when he was in prison, and it’s just the ordinary things…

ANDRA. Yes.

Thank you