The play 'A Moment of Silence' written and directed by well-known Iranian theater director Mohammad Yaghoubi is participating in the SummerWorks Theater Festival in Toronto, Canada, August 4-14.
A production of the Nowadays Theater Group (founded by Yaghoubi) in association with Modern Times Stage Company, the play, featuring Canadian actors, has seven performances at the event, Honaronline reported.
Yaghoubi’s drama is a surreal, poetic, and surprisingly comic meditation on Iran’s modern history. Since its first staging in Tehran in 1998, the play has been revived numerous times and translated into English, French, Czech, Turkish and Kurdish and performed in the US, Belgium and the Czech Republic.
In the play, a girl Shiva wakes up to find she has been asleep for three years. In that time, the world around her has changed drastically. Her friends and family seem different. Strangers act oddly. It is Iran in 1980 and she has just slept through the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
For the next 10 years, she continues to fall asleep for years at a time. Each time she wakes up there are new changes which she has to try to grasp: the war with Iraq, a series of murders as well as transformations in her own family.
Yaghoubi is a multi award-winning playwright, director, screenwriter and theater instructor. He has earned many awards and honors for his plays 'Drought & Lies', 'Geraniums', 'Dance of the Torn Papers' and 'Winter 88' from Fajr International Theater Festival and National Theater Critics Society.
Founded in 1991, SummerWorks is Canada’s largest festival of theater, music and live art. For 11 days every August, it hosts over 500 artists, performing in over 60 performance projects.
