NASSIM

At The Cultch until May 19, 2019
Tickets from $24 at tickets.thecultch.com or 604-251-1363

Posted May 8, 2019

“Yeki bood. Yeki nabood.” Freely translated from Farsi it means, “There was one and there was no-one” and it’s the story-opening equivalent of, “Once upon a time”.

So, yeki bood, yeki nabood, there was a young Iranian playwright named Nassim Soleimanpour who could not get a passport to leave his home in Tehran so he sent his plays – like White Rabbit, Red Rabbit – all over the world where everybody loved them. Nassim eventually got a passport, moved to Berlin and travels from country to country sharing his inventive style of theatre like NASSIM, commission by Bush Theatre (London). But now that Nassim travels freely and is an international success, he misses “Mumun”, his mother, back in Iran. Amazingly, he keeps in touch with her in NASSIM. But how he does that is a surprise and you have to see the play to find out how he does it.

NASSIM is full of surprises. Every night there is a different actor. The actor has never met Nassim and has never read the script; there has been no rehearsal.  The script is in a box, sitting on a table on the stage. None of us except Nassim know what’s going to happen. So NASSIM is not a play in any traditional sense but it’s very playful in its exploration of language, culture, friendship and what ‘home’ means to us.

On a large white screen, the actor is given instructions – what to say and, in italics, what not to say. Of course, we’re all reading it, too.  There’s a lot of audience participation as the actor – and eventually Nassim himself – guides us through some basic Farsi words: house, mother, playwright and, on opening night an audience-volunteered suggestion, defenestrate.  Yes, defenestrate, ‘to throw someone out the window’.

Actor/writer Carmen Aguirre handled NASSIM with panache, abundant good humour and quick response to Nassim’s silent, sometimes mimed direction: a nod toward a red ‘X’ on the stage, a hand gesture toward the mike or the chair. There’s lots of techie stuff: a video cam, projections, a cellphone. And some low-tech stuff like tomatoes, lots of tomatoes.

Other actors who will be taking the challenge are  Adam Grant Warren (May 8), Maiko Yamamoto (May 9), Marcus Youssef (May 10), Craig Erickson (May 11), Christine Quintana (May 12), Dawn Petten (May 14), Pippa Mackie (May 15), Quelemia Sparrow (May 16), Tetsuro Shigematsu (May 17), Conor Wylie (May 18), Donna Soares (May 19).

It’s all tremendously entertaining and eventually rather sad when you discover that Nassim’s plays are not written in Farsi, his mother tongue, have never been seen in Iran and that his Mumun, who does not speak English, will never see what is garnering Nassim and NASSIM international success. Language, we are reminded, connects us and divides us. Mumun, to world-traveller Nassim, means home and that, for many of us, is a universally-shared emotion.