The Anniversary Gift

In the summer of 2004, I went to a small hall in the City Theater complex to watch the play “Anniversary Gift”. I remember the moment at the end of the show… We stood up, clapped and waited in the rows between the seats for a way out. I left the hall, but the puppeteer in the play remained in my memory.

Some time passed…

The playscript was uploaded on the Iran Theater website. I immediately opened the text and read it several times that day and the following days. The puppeteer  in the play became more prominent in my mind. It changed shape. He was doing different things and was saying things out of context.

Some time passed…

One day when I was a university student, I was talking with my friend and colleague, Abuzar Farhadi, about theater and our ideas, when we decided to perform “Anniversary Gift”.

One of the last training sessions was on a Friday morning. The Friday when gasoline suddenly became expensive. We practiced in a plateau near Hafez bridge. In front of the plateau, there was a gas station and in front of the gas station, a police car…

The atmosphere in the city and the country was tense, and even more tense in the university. We were arguing in the team over whether we should perform in this situation or not. And we decided to perform.

Now that I’m writing this note, I think about those days and ask myself if we made the right decision… and my answer is “Yes, it was the best decision in those circumstances.”

“Anniversary Gift” was performed in October/November 2017, in Professor Samandarian hall in the campus of Fine Arts.

Ahmad Shamlu sometimes puts a few words together in his poems and makes a sentence or a phrase which is difficult to translate for someone who does not know Farsi. But we, whose mother tongue is Persian, understand the meaning of his opinion through the meaning and sound of these words.

“Anniversary Gift” is our first experience in theater designing and directing, in which we borrowed from Shamlu’s poetry style. Our attempt was to create an atmosphere by putting acts, colors, sounds and seemingly unrelated words together instead of using obvious words and mise-en-scène. Naturally, the whole performance was not designed like this for the first test, and we went back and forth to this idea during the performance.

Later, we used another form of this experience in the play “Good night, and day…” and we will probably return to this form in the future.

Babak Hejri