darvag theater presents:

It's not about Pomegranates!

a new play by:

Sepideh Khosrowjah

with:

Ana Bayat King

Richard Reinholdt

directed by:

Hamid Ehya

Thursday through Sunday

March 31- APRIL 10, 2011

8 PM

running time: 90 minutes

Map

The Boxcar Playhouse
505 Natoma Street (at 6th Street)
San Francisco, CA 94103

tickets: $20

buy tickets now

info and reservation:510- 982-6311

From the press release:

H.L. Menken once defined love as the triumph of imagination over intelligence. In Sepideh Khosrowjah’s latest play It is not about Pomegranates!, a play replete with both imagination and intelligence, a pair of evenly-matched lovers fight, flirt, reveal innermost secrets, and conceal the most basic human desires. When Atoosa, an Iranian-American playwright meets Sean, a San Francisco theater company manager, for the first time to discuss Atoosa’s play, it becomes immediately apparent that this is not a simple business meeting. Sean’s Office becomes an arena in which casual small talk quickly soars into complex philosophical meditations on life, love and being. The passion of the encounter turns into a full blaze that leaves nothing but ashes and cinder of long-held cultural and gender stereotypes. In the best Hawksian tradition, protagonists who are capable of articulating the most complex ideas about the world become tongue-tied to express the simplest human emotions. As Shakespeare would say: Aye, there’s the rub; for the way to human heart is never a straight path and is rarely guarded by rationality.

Ms. Khosrowjah, whose impressive body of work as a playwright spans three decades and a wide range of themes and styles, in her first long piece in English has fashioned a tour-de-force that seamlessly weaves personal and social, timeless and historical, and absurd and serious.

Photo: Jon R. King

Ana Bayat King

A graduate of the Anahita Stanislavsky School of Acting and Birmingham School of Speech and Drama, Ana has been actively engaged in theatre, film and voice over on a multilingual level for over two decades. She grew up in Barcelona, has lived in Tehran and London and settled down in the Bay Area in 2000. This is her first Darvag production.

To find out more, visit:www.anabayat.com/

Richard Reinholdt

Richard Reinholdt has been playing on Bay Area stages since 1990, primarily with Berkeley's Shotgun Players. He was last seen playing Norman in the 2010 Shotgun production of Alan Ayckbourn's "Norman Conquests" trilogy.

Richard is the recipient of San Francisco Bay Guardian Upstage/Downstage Award /Outstanding Male Performer, for his superb performance in Wallace Shawn Festival by Berkeley's Last Planet Theatre.
Richard is currently nominated for the 2010 Best Principal Performance Award by The San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle.  

For more information please visit: www.richardreinholdt.com/

Sepideh Khosrowjah

Sepideh Khosrowjah left Iran when she was seventeen. She is one of the co-founders of Darvag, an Iranian/American theatre group in Berkeley, established in 1985. Sepideh has worked with Darvag as a playwright, actor, and director. She has written a number of plays including; If You Leave I'll be Lonely, Who Is Going to Give Us Another Chance, Morgheh Sahar, and The Beginning of Cold Season. Her play, In Memory of Kazem Ashtari, was last performed in the 19^th International Iranian Women's Studies Foundation (IWSF) conference in Berkeley in 2008. In 2007, a collection of her plays was published in Iran by Nila Publications. Sepideh's writings have a definite emphasis on woman's issues. In 2008, as a reflection or reaction to ever increasing memoirs of Iranian women living outside of Iran, she wrote the English language play, It's not about pomegranate!.

  Read "I am not a pomegranate" on Iranian.com

Hamid Ehya

Hamid Ehya studied theater at Tehran University and received his MA from Dep. of Performance Studies at New York University. He has worked with Darvag as a director, actor, and translator since 1985. Hamid has translated and published many plays in Iran and his articles have appeared in theater journals in Iran and abroad. Hamid last directed In Memory of Kazem Ashtari in Berkeley in 2009.

Visit hamid's weblog in Farsi.

Is Orhan Pamuk talking about "it's not about pomegranates"?!

From Gaurdian of London:

The Nobel prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk has complained that the majority of human experience is being ignored because the literature that describes it is not written in English. And he has criticised the response of British and American literary critics to his work, saying they perceive him in narrow terms defined by his nationality

Pamuk, who teaches humanities at Columbia University, also accused literary critics of constantly trying to "provincialise" his work. "When I write about love, the critics in the US and Britain say that this Turkish writer writes very interesting things about Turkish love. Why can't love be general? I am always resentful and angry of this attempt to narrow me and my capacity to experience this humanity," he complained. "You are squeezed and narrowed down, cornered down as a writer whose book is considered only the representation of his national voice and a little bit of anthropological curiosity."
Read the entire article here