Shadi Ghaheri, a third-year director at the Yale School of Drama, once told me she doesn’t like to direct “new plays.” I reminded her of that comment when talking to her about her thesis project, Death of Yazdgerd, by Bahram Beyzai, which runs Dec. 5 – 9 at the Iseman Theater on Chapel Street. The play dates from 1979, so could be called “new” compared to a classic. Beyzai’s play, Ghaheri pointed out, “is a masterpiece and is the equivalent, at least in its themes, of something like King Lear.” So, while the play is relatively new, the story is very old.
Or is it?
In the play — originally written in Persian and translated by Manuchehr Anvar — we’re back in 651 at the end of the Sasanian Empire. The play concerns Yazdgerd III, the last Sassanid emperor, whose death marked the victory of the Arab conquest whereby Islam displaced Zoroastrianism as the official religion of Iran. The play derives from a single, famous line from the historical account of Yazdgerd’s death, which describes how the king, “hard-pressed by the Arabs on his western flank, fled to Marv, where he was killed by a miller in a mill where the king had taken refuge.”
The miller, his wife, and his daughter each tells a version of the events. The nature of the king — as a man and as a representative of his kingdom’s inequities — becomes thematically relevant in their different enactments. There is tension, Ghaheri said, between the commoners, represented by the miller and his family, and the ruling class who hear the case. And Yadzgerd himself becomes a symbolic figure.
“The king would be regarded as a divine figure, but also a figurehead of the Zoroastrian religion, so his death is the end of an era,” Ghaheri said.
T. Charles Erickson Photo
Ghaheri.
The play, which was made into a film in 1982, Ghaheri said, “is often likened to Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon because both feature different testimonies about a death.” Ghaheri and her dramaturg, Ariel Sibert, also likened the play’s situation to the story of Scheherazade — who famously told a different story for 1,000 nights to avoid a death sentence — in that the stories told of how Yazdgerd met his end dramatize not only the effort to find the truth of the king’s death, but also the relations among the accused, who confuse the story to keep the miller from being executed.
In Ghaheri’s production, the story is told with live musicians, using the ancient Persian story-telling technique called naqqāli: a convention in which a single storyteller acts out all the parts of his or her recitation, accompanied by music. The music will be provided by Iranian singer-songwriter Mohsen Namjoo. Namjoo, who the New York Times has called “a sort of Bob Dylan of Iran,” is a musician and actor best-known for the recent film Radio Dreams. He has held a residency at Stanford and been a visiting scholar at Brown.
In the rehearsal I saw, Namjoo offered instrumentalist commentary that included truly arresting “mouth sounds,” which might be screams or percussive noises or guttural harmonies. The range of interplay of text with music adds to a unique theatrical experience. The overall effect will be enhanced by shadow projections against a sprawling background map that emphasizes the land masses affected by the death of the king.
Ghaheri and Sibert pointed out that the mix of traditional form with contemporary handling makes for a type of theater that recalls the innovations of Bertolt Brecht, with actors taking on different roles while accompanied by music with a very definite presence. The drama’s style of acting differs greatly from the default naturalism of most U.S. productions. But mixing styles between contemporary and ancient has been a hallmark of Ghaheri’s work at Yale. Some notable shows she directed include The Slow Sound of Snow, a gripping contemporary fable, at Yale Cabaret. At the Yale Summer Cabaret where she was co-artistic director this past summer, she helmed Lear, Young Jean Lee’s absurdist revision of Shakespeare, and a powerful staging of Ellen McLaughlin’s translation of Euripides’s The Trojan Women.
Death of Yazdgerd, in its original incarnation, was banned in Iran. Authorities saw its story of the ascendancy of Islam as a figure for the theocratic rule of Ayatollah Khomeini after disposing the Shah of Iran in 1979. For Ghaheri, the relativity of truth in Beyzai’s play is important to its theme of history as written by the victors, a factor that makes some stories subversive. In Death of Yazdgerd, the question may be who in the present finally gets to say what happened in the past.
Death of Yazdgerd runs at the Iseman Theatre, 1156 Chapel St., Dec. 5 to 9. Click here for tickets and more information.