Theater artist Kourosh Soleimani has restaged the comedy play ‘Suddenly, Tin Can’ at Sangelaj Theater in south Tehran with slight changes.
In the follow up to its earlier successful three-week performance in the winter of 2014 at the University of Tehran Students’ Club, and positive feedback from the audience and artists, the play started staging again on Sunday, April 3, Mehr News Agency reported.
Written by Amir Ali Nabavian, it is a comic narration of three historical figures from different eras, Avicenna, Amir Kabir, and Barbod, and their encounters in today’s Tehran where they have been forced to quit their profession and find an ordinary job to make ends meet.
Avicenna (980-1037) was a Persian polymath whose corpus includes writings on philosophy, medicine, astronomy, alchemy, geography and geology, theology, logic, physics and poetry.
Mirza Taghi Khan Farahani, better known as Amir Kabir (1807-1852), was the chief minister to Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (Shah of Persia) for the first three years of his reign and one of the most capable and innovative figures in the entire Qajar dynasty.
Barbod (590 to 628) was a Persian musician of the Sassanid era (ruled Persia from 224 to 651).
“The story is a behavioral and social investigation in comic and rhythmic language,” said the director.
The new performance has undergone some changes in the selection of actors and stage design. “Due to busy schedules, two actors were replaced. In addition, earlier we performed in a black box theater (consists of a simple, unadorned performance space with black walls). But the new venue has a picture frame stage (where the audience directly faces the stage - typically raised several meters above the front row - and views only one side of the scene, posing some changes to the mise en scene,” Soleimani said.
Pointing to the decoration, he said, “From the beginning we were concerned about a minimal set design. This will help the audience make a connection with the work soon.”
The social comedy telling the story of the fantasy journey of prominent historical figures into today’s world is narrated through harmonic and rhythmic language.
Vahid Aqapour, Ramin Sayar-Dashti, Masih Kazemi, Mohammad Tayyeb-Taher, Arastoo Khosh-Razm and Mohammadreza Azadfar are in the cast.
The play will run until May 6 at the theater, located in Behesht St., Vahdat Eslami St.
