Returning home

Afternoon sunlight shines through the large front windows of
Onelight Theatre’s office, a floor above Argyle Street’s busy
restaurant row. It casts a warm glow, almost like a stage set, bouncing
off painted-red walls and wood floors, maquettes from previous shows,
well-worn books on the full shelves. It’s the day after their play
The Veil opened at Ship’s Company Theatre in Parrsboro, and
artistic director Shahin Sayadi has a terrible cold. You can see it in
his eyes—how tired he must be—and yet he’s still apologetic for his
condition. Sayadi’s aunt, in town visiting, is on a mission to find him
Cold-FX and more liquids.

Sayadi’s nephew from Tehran is also here, a quiet boy with gorgeous
eyes who sits with purpose, as if waiting to join the grown-up
conversation. Sayadi’s daughter, Azat, plays on a computer; bleeping
electronic sounds from a kids’ game punctuate the quiet. The newest
addition to the family, six-week-old Zand, sleeps away, until demanding
lunch from mom, Sayadi’s wife Maggie Stewart, who is also Onelight’s
managing director.

Really, this is a familiar portrait. A Saturday afternoon scenario
played out hundreds, thousands of times in generations of young
families. But this family’s story, and its connection to a larger
world, is at the heart of Onelight’s new play, Return Ticket:
Halifax-Abadan-Halifax, which opens at Neptune Studio Theatre on
November 20.

The origins of this story go back to Sayadi’s childhood, and to his
hometown, Abadan, Iran. In 2006, Sayadi wrote an open letter he titled
“Rivers, Sharks and Trees,” about his family’s history. The idea of the
play flowed from his own words, almost like the Arvand Rood, the river
that separates Iran from Iraq. Sayadi’s father’s family is from
Khorramshahr, on the tip of the Persian Gulf. According to Sayadi,
Abadan is about 20 minutes south from there, and both are located along
the Arvand Rood.

As a child Sayadi would visit his grandparents’ house in
Khorramshahr. He loved to climb date trees. From the top of one of
those tall trees he could even see the Iraqi city of Basra. But in
1980, Saddam Hussein destroyed the treaty that recognized Arvand Rood
as a shared territory. Then he declared war against Iran.

“Saddam wanted to take my river. That river was full of sharks. My
river, my sharks and my tree,” Sayadi writes in his letter.

On September 18, 1980 (27 Shahrivar 1359 of the Iranian Calendar),
Abadan was bombed. Twenty-one people were killed on that first day,
including Sayadi’s father. According to his letter, troops then crossed
the Arvand Rood, towards his grandparents’ house and the trees that he
loved.

But Sayadi’s father is not the direct focus of this play. Return
Ticket begins with the story of another relative, a cousin—who
died four years ago, from the effects of the chemical warfare—famous
for staying in his hometown through eight years of war, never picking
up a gun, never leaving. A few years ago Sayadi went back to Iran to
write his story, research and to do interviews. This play is about that
journey.

“In the middle of this, of finding out about that story, I find out
about my own father,” says Sayadi. “He died the first day of the war,
so he’s considered, amongst many, many others, a martyr. And he was
also the main person in theatre in our city. I’m going to write a story
about my cousin who was a soccer player, who stayed there, and all
these people also know my father, and I get caught up in ‘Oh, you’re
his son, when did you leave? How did you leave?’ And I have to face
when I left, how I left.”

Sayadi returned to Canada after his trip, questioning whether he did
the right thing by leaving Iran. Should he feel guilty? Or relieved? He
and Stewart acknowledge these are common emotion, among those who have
left families and cultures behind in the face of conflict.

Stewart says this is a very familiar story of diaspora, from those
who originate from places of turmoil. “I think it touches a lot of
people from any number of countries from Africa or Afghanistan or
somewhere,” she says, with Zand’s tiny head resting on her shoulder.
“Where there’s a situation where you’re torn between leaving for your
own safety and leaving behind your family and culture, and coming to
Canada, where you have a life that is so different from the life you
may have had there and the lives of your family members have.”

Of course these internal struggles also have a rippling effect. In
this world we never totally stand alone, especially when in a
relationship. Stewart and Sayadi collaborate in Onelight Theatre, they
have two children together, and during conversations, they gently
correct each other’s facts. This is what couples do. And this is why
Maggie is also a character in Return Ticket (Actors for the two
parts haven’t been cast yet). It’s a play about identity, but it’s also
about how those struggles spider out and touch others.

Stewart says, “By putting in the framework of one family—from
Halifax to two cities in Iran—is a way people can relate. It’s
human.”

Sayadi agrees. “I think because of the social, economical and
historical issues in Iran that are so complicated, Maggie and I didn’t
want…we don’t think we can put anyone else through the story, and
tell the story. We’re going to some scary dark places. We just couldn’t
bring ourselves to say, ‘This is such and such’ and give him a
character, and a job.”

“I think it would have been too much of our own story anyway not to
be honest about it,” says Stewart.

“We know it’s going to be scary and really emotional, that’s where
we’re going,” concludes Sayadi.

When Sayadi conceived of this idea, he was sure that
electronic media would play a role in the play’s development.

“We had plans to use remote actors with fancy phones and having
Skype or the phone itself, or internet, or fancy phones like Nokia,
where you can just stream the video live,” he says. “The idea is that
there’s this man going with a return ticket, with his wife and daughter
in constant touch, and that the wife knows the danger.”

During Sayadi’s trip, he went right to the border of Iran and Iraq,
which has been controlled since 1988, equipped with a voice recorder
and a tiny high-quality microphone, built by friends.

“Maggie knowing that I’m going and asking questions and going to
places I shouldn’t be,” Sayadi says, “knowing that there’s this woman
behind the project—Maggie, which she always is. The two are
constantly in touch and talking about this stuff, and losing
connections.”

During his interviews, Sayadi spoke to a woman who killed an Iraqi
soldier with her own hand, and who continued to fight for Iran’s
independence. Another woman, who has a best-selling book in Iran, spoke
about staying alone in the graveyard at night, fighting off the dogs so
she can bury the dead, when she was only 16 years old.

“On the other side of the story,” says Sayadi, “when you go to
Tehran, some of them really believe they’re doing the right thing, that
they’re sending people in the right direction. They seem like nice
people, who really truly believe in what they’re doing.”

Of course, this all happened before the controversial Iranian
election last June where Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was once again declared a
victor, and the subsequent protests, arrests, tortures, deaths and rise
of the green movement that are still continuing today. Originally green
was the symbol of candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s campaign, but it now
symbolizes a culture’s fight for justice.

Social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook also became a
swath of green, a means of grassroots protest and communication among
family and friends separated by geography. It also confirmed Onelight’s
decision to incorporate technology into Return Ticket.

“I feel redeemed. We were on the right theme,” says Stewart.

Sayadi interjects: “I think for a lot of the wrong reasons. A lot of
people had to die, and there are still more people’s names that are
coming out that are dying. For those three weeks, again, I didn’t leave
the computer. I was in constant contact with family—my mom, my
sister, my brother, friends, friends involved in the system. It was
just hell.”

Return Ticket has taken on new immediacy because of the
election, but don’t think of it as a political statement. “We believe
in dialogue,” says Sayadi. “We don’t care about the political
propaganda on this side or that side—we want people to talk.”

Return Ticket is the second play under Onelight’s
umbrella Civilian Project, an exploration on how war and conflict
impacts even those who aren’t on the battlelines. The first production,
The Toxic Bus Incident, written by Greg MacArthur, was inspired
by a real incident that took place in Vancouver, where passengers on a
city bus were convinced they were poisoned, though they were not. The
sounds and set for that production—dramatic screens of stark-white
sterile blocks—were initially inspired by Sayadi’s repeated listens
to MIA’s music.

They’re still not sure how the set and technologies will play out
for Return Ticket: Sayadi is off to Vancouver to work with
theatre company and friends, Boca Del Lupo, who have more experience in
media manipulation for theatre. The story structure is there: what they
can do, technically, will help dictate its path.

The future is also unclear for Iran. In January, when Onelight
toured The Veil to the Fadjr International Theatre Festival in
Tehran, it took almost 11 months of negotiation and the support of
like-minded people within the system to accommodate the play, which was
controversial because it hit on some taboo subjects that “something
that aren’t talked about.” But in the end, The Veil was
performed without cutting any lines.

Right before the election, Onelight was invited to return to the
festival with a new show. They’ve started preliminary work on an
adaptation of Habib Ahmadzadeh’s novel Chess with the Doomsday
Machine, which is set in Abadan. It’s envisioned as a bilingual
co-production with an Iranian team, where artists, actors and composers
from the two countries could collaborate on a single project, and have
a shared experience. The plan was for Sayadi’s family to spend time in
Iran; all the logisitics, even schooling for Azat, was prepared.

But now life is different there. You have to take sides, and safety
is a concern.

“The truth is that nobody knows where they stand, whether they’re
liberal or not. I don’t think anyone is on solid footing,” says
Stewart. “When we enter, our whole family enters on Iranian passports.
We go there and one of the main target groups that they’re looking at
are foreign-living Iranians, living in western countries involved in
anything that smacks of liberal arts, culture, journalism, law,
sciences.

“Our funding comes from government sources, so it’s not a big
stretch for someone looking for a reason to ask ‘Who are you, what are
you doing here,’ and to say, ‘You’re living in Canada, you’re doing
artistic cultural propaganda work, maybe, and you’re funded by your
government.'”

In the meantime, the couple stays on top of the news and keeps in
touch with family, but they’re just not sure what will come next.

Although the audience will leave Return Ticket:
Halifax-Abadan-Halifax with a better sense of Iranian history, that
is, perhaps, missing the point. Onelight’s stories are built on
empathy, to resonate with many, from immigrants from other countries,
to those who have heard displacement stories from grandparents and
other relatives.

“So many people here in Canada are affected by war; whether it’s
their brother in Afghanistan or Iraq, or their sister is fighting in
one of those places,” says Sayadi. “Even if people don’t, they’re still
living in this community.”

Stewart hopes the production will “shed a light on all the wars and
all the disputes and political unrest all over the world,” she says.
“It’s hard to imagine how many people’s lives, over and over again, for
so many generations, are touched by one thing like this. The example of
Shahin’s family:from one small drop of water, radiates all these
consequences.”

Return Ticket: Halifax-Abadan-Halifax, Neptune Studio Theatre, 1593 Argyle Street, times and prices, TBA.

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This article appears in Sep 24-30, 2009.