AIAW Featured Writer: SALAR ABDOH

Salar Abdoh - Writer

At a memorial for Reza I once likened him to a shooting star that burned fast and furiously and died too young. In retrospect, I think it was the whole theater company that merits that astral comparison. For Dar-a-Luz, it seems to me now more than ever, truly was something of a force of nature. It was an ensemble bearing such raw power that in the years since the end of the theater company, I have often been stumped in trying to convey to those who ask just what Dar-a-Luz was all about and how it felt to witness one of their plays closely. There was something of an end-of-time quality in the way Dar-a-Luz went about things. As if the world had reached some final stage of frenzy, there was little time, and there was one last show left to offer.

Some of this, I believe, had to do with Reza’s acute awareness of his own progressing illness. But coupled with that, there was, I’m convinced, the influence of Reza’s having grown up in a country that is nearly exclusively Shi’te Moslem. I can mention this topic only now because until recent times most Westerners would have had little idea what I was referring to. The current Middle East war has of course changed all that. And if I do talk about it here at all it is because I think this particular aspect of Reza Abdoh’s background still calls for research and is probably vital to the total understanding of his theater and his world.

Shi’sm is essentially the creed of the vanquished; it has a chiliastic outlook towards history and it regards the world in an intensely emotional and messianic way. As such, it is pure theater, for it constantly dramatizes its own well-documented ancient defeats through the performance of passion plays as well as extreme but highly organized displays of public ritual such as male self-flagellation and even mutilation. The sheer scale of these annually choreographed dramas of excess is such that it’s hard not to be affected by them. I believe that Reza was affected, profoundly so. To him, theater that did not hurt was no theater at all. And one could see that he infected – in the best sense of the word – those around him with the same feeling of urgency that shadowed him to the very end. In those days of Dar-a-Luz, watching the cast from the sidelines and witnessing the formidable rehearsals and performances they endured, I often thought of the lot of them as warriors on a mission. They, all of them, seemed not quite of this world, and yet, like Reza himself, intensely of this world. I was awed by them, by all of Dar-A-Luz; I felt humbled by their efforts, and felt no less that I’d been blessed with the chance to be a close onlooker and watch the evolution of a legend.

I have taken some time to note all this to make one thing plain: having never been an actor or director or a researcher and scholar of theater, I cannot really discuss Reza’s precise theatrical influences. What I can do, however, is to recall bits and pieces from the arc of a career: the early years, for instance, when I might catch a bus to come down to Los Angeles from Northern California to see a production of King Lear in a hole-in-the-wall space in Hollywood. I don’t think Reza was even twenty then. It was long before Dar-a-Luz or even his work with the Los Angeles Theater Center, LATC. The Iranian hostage crisis was still a relatively fresh wound in the American psyche. And in order to survive, among the many things Reza did back then was to work as a night manager in a small hotel, not too far away from that Hollywood theater, where at night he would struggle to stay awake and jot down his ideas. I saw King Lear and other small productions of his back then, and recall having an intuition of what only later I would be able to verbalize: namely, that even at that young age the director had already mastered the craft of compressing time, of packing each interval with the kind of rare energy that left room for no lumbering downtime.

“Why such energy? Because Reza’s fuel, his theater, was his deep sense of rage at the sheer, bloody unfairness of life at every turn for so many people, so much of the time.” Reza had known extreme wealth in Iran and he’d known terrible poverty as an exile and an immigrant in America. He’d seen the world through both lenses and he hadn’t liked what he saw either way, for he knew from experience that the weak seldom inherit the earth, and even when they do – as in Iran after the Islamic revolution – things never quite turn out as one would have hoped. Reza Abdoh’s theater, then, has always been for me the ultimate form of political theater.

Politics is what we have to deal with all the time now. And as I understand, it is perhaps a main premise for our talk today. Also, being told that another theme of our discussion is Susan Sontag’s essay, “Regarding The Torture Of Others: Social and political ramifications of photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison”, I went back to that essay – which may have been Sontag’s very last – and gave it a fresh read. I have to admit that I found one of the essay’s basic assumptions, that “to live is to be photographed,” arguable; and the further assumption derived from the first, that “the pictures [from Abu Ghraib] will not go away,” I found to be already superseded by the passage of time, and not a very long time at that.

My contention is that, on the contrary, Abu Ghraib is already forgotten, or nearly so. In our time everything is forgotten, even as it is happening. It is the nature of a stuffed and overfull society wallowing in what Sontag very appropriately termed in the same essay a “culture of shamelessness” where “unapologetic brutality” eternally reigns. One only has to turn on the television and begin switching channels to know, unmistakably, what Sontag was talking about. And that, by the way, was just about all Reza was doing during his own last days. Lying in bed and changing and changing channels. It was as if he wanted to drink in as much of that muck as possible, letting it sink in deep, already sensing perhaps that in the end little would be remembered and everything of substance forgotten.


Salar Abdoh

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