Princeton students Kian Petlin '28, Natalia Bonilla '29, and Isabella Rivera '27 (left to right) in rehearsal for the Lewis Center's production of Mohammad Yaghoubi's play, A Moment of Silence. Photo credit: Jon Sweeney
(PRINCETON, NJ) -- The Lewis Center for the Arts' Program in Theater and Music Theater at Princeton University presents A Moment of Silence by celebrated Iranian playwright and director Mohammad Yaghoubi. The play, presented in an English translation, offers a surreal, poetic, unexpectedly humorous, and deeply human meditation on Iran's turbulent modern history. Performances are October 31, November 1 and 7 at 8:00pm and November 8, 2025 at 2:00pm & 8:00pm at the Berlind Theatre at McCarter Theatre Center.
A Moment of Silence follows Shiva, the protagonist, as she wakes up to find she has been asleep for three years, only to realize she has missed the Islamic Revolution. Over the next decade, she continues to slip in and out of sleep, awakening each time to a drastically altered world: the war with Iraq, the murders of dissident artists, and upheavals within her own family. Layered with absurdity and poignancy, the play also follows the increasingly perilous journey of the playwright shaping Shiva's story, as anonymous threats begin to blur the boundary between art and reality.
A Moment of Silence, translated into English by Yaghoubi and Torange Yeghiazarian, is highly acclaimed in Iran and internationally, having also been translated into French, Czech, Turkish and Kurdish. It has been hailed as the best play to emerge from Iran since the 1979 Revolution and widely acclaimed for the playwright's imaginative approach to realism. The play has been recognized by the New Play Contest of the Toronto Fringe Festival, the Playwrights' Society of Iran Award for Outstanding Play, the Iranian National Theatre Critics Society Award for Outstanding Direction, and the International Theatre Festival of Iran Award for Outstanding Direction.
Presented internationally and in other parts of the U.S., the Princeton production is the first in this region of the country. The production is directed by Iranian director Nikoo Mamdoohi with dramaturgy by Q-mars Haeri, postdoctoral research associate in Princeton's Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies.
Tickets are $20 and $10 for students available through the McCarter Box Office. The Berlind Theatre (91 University Place in Princeton, NJ) is fully accessible with wheelchair and companion seating and an assistive listening system. The November 7th performance will be open captioned. Guests in need of other access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at [email protected] at least one week prior to the event date.
The production is being significantly supported by the new Princeton Humanities Initiative. This hub for interdisciplinary inquiry and idea incubation is designed to bring people together to think critically and imaginatively about the human experience and to fuel innovative research, teaching, and civic engagement to address the key challenges of our time. The production is also the first in a series of collaborative projects connecting the Theater Program's "Rehearsal and Performance" course and Professor Tamsen Wolff's "Global Plays and Politics" course in the English Department, a development supported by the University's 250th Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education.
The selection of the play as a centerpiece of the Program in Theater and Music Theater's 2025-26 season, according to Jane Cox, director of the program, is based on the Lewis Center's ongoing efforts to bring lesser heard voices and stories to American stages. It was also chosen as a first international project in the new collaboration between Cox and Wolff for connecting the two courses.
Director Mamdoohi has worked extensively in Iran and the United States. She has directed new plays, devised work, and experimental pieces that seek to discover innovative ways of engaging audiences, always striving, she notes, "to create singular, fleeting experiences that echo the transience of life itself." In Iran, Mamdoohi founded the Vaahe Art Collective in 2008 and directed productions at prominent festivals, including the Fadjr International Theater Festival, and in venues such as Tehran City Theater. Now based in Washington, D.C., she continues to develop projects that connect diverse communities through performance. Her recent work in the United States includes presenting Lost in the Ocean Waves at Arena Stage and directing Home, the first Farsi-language production staged at the Kennedy Center. She has also collaborated with Convergence Theatre (Snapshots), Theatre Prometheus (The Cassette Shop), and the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University. She notes that her artistic vision is rooted in the belief that sharing our stories on stage can bring us closer together and deepen our understanding of one another.
As dramaturg for the production, Haeri provides the cast and crew with vital knowledge, research, and interpretation about the theatrical work, such as the temporal, geographic, or cultural setting. Haeri received his Ph.D. in May 2024 in theater and performance studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. He is a theater historian and practitioner whose research interest is on cultural production in Iran. From 2022 to 2024, Haeri served as a faculty member and director of the theater program at the American University of Kuwait. At Princeton's Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies, he is working on developing his dissertation project, Popular Theatre in Iran: A Social History of Lalehzari Performances, into a manuscript.
The cast includes students Tima Alshuabi, Natalia Bonilla, Anika Reddy Chapalapalli, Dante Kanterezhi-Gatto, Kian Petlin, and Isabella Rivera.
In addition to Mamdoohi and Haeri, the professional production team includes Iranian designers Omid Akbari for the set and Afsaneh Aayani for costumes, and stage manager Milan Eldridge, with original music composed by Pedram Babaiee. Students on the production team include Alex Picoult as lighting designer, Kristen Tan as sound designer, Nadine Allache as assistant dramaturg, and Hellen Ding and Nayrouz Tantush as assistant stage manager, joined by Alexandria Chery, a recent participant in the Lewis Center's Princeton Production Workforce Training program. Lecturer in Theater Aaron Landsman is the faculty co-producer.
A range of additional programming is being offered in conjunction with the production. On November 1 playwright Mohammad Yaghoubi will Zoom in for a post-show talkback, a translation workshop will be offered on November 6 (pre-registration required), and on November 7 a pre-show conversation with translator Torange Yeghiazarian will be held at 5:00pm.
A video display with a timeline of Iranian events relevant to the play, historical photographs, curated Iranian music and soundscapes, and examples of changes in clothing over time will be on view in the upper Berlind lobby. The installation was created in collaboration with Wolff, students in the "Global Plays and Politics" course, and the project's scholars and artists. This space will be used for various community events and conversations happening around the production and will be open before and after show times to the community.
The artists and scholars of the project will also interact with Princeton students and local high school students. Director Mamdoohi, set designer Akbari, and costume designer Aayani will share a design presentation for multiple Princeton classes and visit the "Theatrical Design Studio" course; dramaturg Haeri will be a guest in the "Global Plays and Politics" course, as will Akbari, Aayani, and Mamdoohi; and translator Torange Yeghiazarian will visit with the cast and production team of the production through the course, "Theater Rehearsal and Performance." In addition, Aayani and Akbari will visit students at Trenton Central High School and will present a theatrical design workshop for Trenton middle and high school students who are part of the Trenton Youth Theater program of Trenton Arts at Princeton. Mamdoohi and Haeri will present a performance and dramaturgy workshop for high school students in collaboration with Trenton Central High School, Princeton University Preparatory Program (PUPP), and the Lydia's Scholars Program. Local high school students will also attend a post-matinee conversation.
In addition to support from the Princeton Humanities Initiative, the production and ancillary programming is cosponsored by Princeton's Program for Community Engaged Scholarship (ProCES) and the Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about this event, the Program in Theater and Music Theater, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.
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