Finding Stanislavski in Tehran

When They All Fled, We Stepped into the Clutches of the Islamic Republic: A coming-of-age story of finding Stanislavski in the heart of Tehran 

Nothing could have prepared me for it. Stepping onto that Tehran-bound Alitalia flight on August 8, 1984, it seemed the universe, as I knew it, was about to implode. At a time when every Iranian family we knew was fleeing the Islamic revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, we were leaping back into its clutches, returning to Tehran so that my father could manage the family business as a matter of survival. Despite the paradoxes of the stifling atmosphere of the Islamic Republic – where musical instruments, dancing, and individualistic expression were all banned – I developed my passion for theater and came into my own as an individual and performer at a time when even the most banal of my memories of my former life in Spain seemed impossibly fantastic --cracking sunflower seeds in the local church plaza with my friends, lying on the beach in a bikini and so on. All of these I clung to, even as they faded like dreams when waking up. And yet, I clung to them. 

In seaside Castelldefels, I was a carefree teenager parading the marina on my bike while my father doted on the beloved white horse he had bought from a celebrated horse show he stabled in the garage of our red brick house. In Iran, not only did I have to learn to cover my hair and wear a long dark coat year-round, I also had to quickly understand and comply with a set of rules that seemed unintuitive given the world I had experienced up to that point both in the Iran before the revolution as well as in the post-Franco Spain. In the 1980s, it was considered illegal to listen to music or watch movies in which there was any hint of human contact, yet every single world musical or theatrical release was readily available couriered to our fifth floor apartment in a triple-locked metal briefcase. Farhad, the clandestine video rental guy would bring to our homes every week to ensure we never missed a dose of pop culture. Women were ordered to cover in public, yet behind closed doors they were the embodiment of haute couture fashion magazines. Consuming alcohol was penalized, yet bootleggers were not scarce. And then of course there were the legendary parties that brought together all the facets of life one wanted to have freely but could only execute in the confinement of one’s private four walls. My first taste of such a party painted a faint smile on my otherwise dowr lips for a moment before the Revolutionary Guards raided it and we ended in detention for four days at Vozara Komité. My relatives still recall I cried for eight months non-stop from the moment I arrived in Iran. I was inconsolable. My new life was a long cry from what I had known leading up to the summer when my mom and I boarded that plane. 

And then the unthinkable happened: I found my love at the end of an alley opposite a Chinese restaurant off of Fatemi Square. She had a big, green metal gate, an inviting garden leading onto the main entrance and her name was Anahita -the logo of a lady sun crowning its street neon sign, the reason for my own name.

My father parked outside the restaurant and, once out of the car, froze at the sight of the acting school. “Could this be the Anahita School of Acting of my days?” he wondered loudly.  A quick visit confirmed it was. “I want to learn to be an actress”, I exclaimed. “It’s a very tough training program; you probably won’t last.” “I bet I will”, I said defiantly. 

The walls of my first drama school were covered in photos of Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky, the father of “the system”, along with some of his better-known quotes such as the fact that an actor must be in training and preparation every day of her life until destined to her grave or that there are no small parts, only small actors. Our master held the status of a semi-God. His name was Mostafa Oskui. We would obediently stand up every time he walked in the room and clung on his every utterance. After all, he was the master, the one who along with his ex-wife Mahin had studied with Yuri Alexandrovich Zavadsky, a direct descendant of Vakhtangov, one of Stanislavski's favorite pupils at the prestigious Russian Institute of Theatre Arts. 

I was the youngest member of the training program and, as such, very impressionable. I believed. I was quickly immersed in the études of action, movement and diction exercises that were the basis of this two-year program. It was intense, highly detailed, technical and very serious. We were like a group of scientists on a mission to dissect an insect holding the answer to highly obscure incurable diseases, analyzing human behavior as the foundation to acting from a place of truth.  

The Anahita School of Acting, despite its strict character, probably saved me from the clutches of the dark cloud that seemed to follow me everywhere when I first arrived to the land of my ancestors, when for a time the only consolation seemed to be finding solace and escape through pop music and letters to and from Spain. It grounded me and gave me the raison d’être that I had seemed to lose along the way.

Soon after the consolation of having something to look forward to and the motivation to work towards my craft, I was not only socializing with well-read people some of whom were very different from me both in terms of social status as well as upbringing, but it was mainly by association with them that I came to learn about the poetry of Forough Farrokhzad and Sohrab Sepehri, the writings of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, the plays of Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky, Ibsen, Ionesco, Grotowski, Brecht and Sir Laurence Olivier, the cinema of Tarkovsky and Parajanov. By this time, I had like-minded friends who threw lavish gatherings at their uptown luxurious homes, but it was with my new intellectual friends from downtown that my brain flourished beyond the limitations of a small European seaside town. With them, many older than me, I learnt about the arts and literature, about how to be creative in the face of restrictions, and when in the company of my European-educated peers, I could dissolve in the pop music of the 80s and still think a poster on my wall was the coolest thing in the world.  At the age of 18, I was equally untroubled in the company of beggars and kings, comfortably navigating the uncertain waters of the east while also identifying as European --a life education money could not have bought me in Castelldefels at that age.  

Thirty years later, reminiscing about my journey from sunny California where I have captured my adventures from Barcelona to Tehran and later from Tehran to London in a one-woman play called Mimi’s Suitcase, I can’t help but marvel at the fact that it was in Iran where I had my first film acting experience at the age of 17, that it was in Iran where I had the privilege of learning about the principles of theatre from the same Russian-educated Stanislavsky master in whose repertory company my father had been actively involved in such classics as A Streetcar Named Desire, Othello and The Little Foxes thirty years before and that it was in Iran where I became fluent in my mother tongue and learnt to make a distinction between people and governments and that everything that happens to us in life is character-forming. It was also thanks to my experience living in Iran that I have come to realize how very resilient we as human being are and that even if I could turn back the hands of time, I would probably not change anything because it was thanks to my time in Iran that I have come to own a palette as richly colorful as a rainbow after the rain.