Support Our First English Speaking Production: A Moment of Silence

About A Moment of Silence

“an unexpected contemporary play from a culture we do not meet every day, A Moment of Silence…charts the recent history of the country of which we hear plenty on the news but about which we do not know that much.” Michaela Příkopová “

A Moment of Silence is an award-winning play by celebrated Iranian playwright and director, Mohammad Yaghoubi. Nowadays Theatre is producing the Canadian premiere of  this surreal, poetic, and surprisingly comic meditation on Iran’s turbulent history for SummerWorks 2016.

Among its many awards are Toronto Fringe Festival’s 2015 New Play contest and the Playwrights’ Society of Iran’s Best Play prize. It has been translated into English, French, Czech, Turkish and Kurdish and performed in Washington and California, USA, Brussels(Belgium by Théâtre de Poche in 2014) and in Prague (The Czech Republic) in January 2016.

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’s Iran in 1980 and she has just slept through the Islamic Revolution. For the next ten years, Shiva continues to fall asleep for years at a time. Each time she wakes up there’s a new change she has to try to grasp: the war with Iraq, a series of murders of dissident artists  as well as transformations in her own family. Meanwhile, the playwright creating Shiva’s story begins to receive phone calls threatening her life.