The Mountain Does Not Answer

  

 

THE MOUNTAIN DOES NOT ANSWER

A Play in Four Acts

Loosely after Nezami Ganjavi's Khamseh

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"The stone knows whether you are serious."

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

THE NARRATOR

A chronic voice. Restrained, almost indifferent. Speaks from outside time—not as judge, but as memory itself. Has seen empires rise and dissolve; this gives neither comfort nor indifference, only clarity.

KING KHOSROW PARVIZ (Khosrow II)

Shahanshah of the Sasanian Empire, 590–628 CE. ‘The Victorious.’ Ruler of the greatest Persian empire since the Achaemenids, master of two continents. His treasury held the Spring of Khosrow—a carpet woven in silk and gemstones so that even in winter the king could walk on spring—and the Throne of Khosrow, a mechanical marvel of revolving heavens. He had restored the Byzantine emperor Maurice’s throne at the cost of Sasanian blood and called it loyalty. History has not been entirely kind: his wars with Byzantium bled Persia to exhaustion, and he died in a cell at his own son’s command. He enters this play at the height of his power—before the long unraveling—intoxicated by history and certain the world moves with him. He is neither monster nor saint; he is the terrifying logic of power convinced of its own righteousness.

SHIRIN

Princess of Armenia, later Queen of Persia. Historically documented as Khosrow’s beloved and eventual wife—a Christian queen in a Zoroastrian court, a woman of formidable intelligence and independent will. Nezami’s Shirin is the most vivid woman in classical Persian poetry: neither passive object nor simple victim, but a person who chooses, delays, and ultimately refuses to be merely possessed. In this play: lucid and inwardly free. Her clarity is mistaken for coldness; her freedom for indecision.

FARHAD KOHKAN

The stonecutter. A figure of legend rather than strict history—Nezami’s great invention—placed in contest with Khosrow for Shirin’s love. Tasked with carving a channel through Mount Bisotun to bring water to the villages below, he is later told—falsely—that Shirin has died, and throws himself from the cliff. His death is the most famous moment in Persian romantic literature. In this play: ascetic, relentless, honest. His hands know what his heart cannot say.

VIZIER MEHRDAD

Minister of reason and state. Interpreter of necessity. Not a villain—something more unsettling: a man of genuine intelligence entirely in service of power.

MARYAM

Shirin’s maid and companion. Observant and quietly sharp. (Historically, Maryam was also the name of Khosrow’s Byzantine princess wife—a detail the play acknowledges as texture.) A witness who survives by understanding what others refuse to see.

SHAPUR

Khosrow’s loyal general and court painter. Historically, Shapur was sent by Khosrow to Armenia carrying portraits of the king, the means by which Shirin first sees Khosrow’s face. A man caught between genuine affection for both king and Shirin, forced to choose whose story he will serve.

THE MERCHANT

A traveler of the Silk Roads. Pragmatic. Has been everywhere and been changed by none of it—which is its own kind of philosophy.

A NOTE ON TIME AND PLACE

The action unfolds across Persia and Armenia in the late Sasanian period—approximately 590–610 CE—but the play makes no effort toward historical realism. Costumes, language, and staging may be anachronistic by design. The historical world is a vessel; the human questions are the cargo. This play is not a drama of politics or empire. It is a drama of persons—of what it costs to be free, to endure, to love, and to remain honest about which of these you are actually doing.

HISTORICAL PRELUDE

Before the play begins, the Narrator speaks in half-light.

NARRATOR

Let us speak of what is known.

Khosrow the Second—called Parviz, the Victorious—

ruled the Sasanian Empire at its furthest reach.

He took Jerusalem. He humiliated Byzantium.

He sat upon a throne that moved with clockwork heavens,

and kept in his treasury a carpet called the Spring of Khosrow—

a garden woven in silk and gold and gemstone flowers,

so that even in winter the king could walk on spring.

He loved Shirin, the Armenian princess, with a devotion

that was also possession—as great loves often are.

He married her. He made her queen.

He also kept an empire’s worth of other women.

Later, his wars would exhaust his treasury and his people.

His son Shiruya would imprison him.

He would die in that cell—slowly, as the histories report it.

Whether Shirin died beside him, or lived on, the accounts disagree.

But that is later. That is the end.

This play lives in the middle—

where the choices were still possible,

where the crown still shone,

where the mountain still resisted.

Three paths cross.

One believes the road explains the walker.

One believes the road must be carved.

One believes there is no road—only steps.

History calls this a love story.

Philosophy calls it a collision of wills.

Poetry says the mountain remembers everything.

They will call this a tragedy.

But tragedy assumes we know what was lost.

What if nothing was ever possessed?

What if the wound is the answer?

(Lights rise. The stage holds three objects throughout every scene: a throne stage left, a stone stage right, an empty chair center.)

ACT ONE

The Weight of the Crown

In which Khosrow Parviz encounters what his power cannot simply take.

SCENE ONE: THE ROYAL COURT OF CTESIPHON

(Everything symmetrical. The great iwan arch of Ctesiphon suggested by light. Courtiers orbit Khosrow like planets around a fixed star. Vizier Mehrdad stands close with documents. Shirin sits apart—near the court, but distinctly not beside the throne. Shapur stands at the back, observing. Sounds of a great city: wheels, trade, distant music from the treasury gardens.)

KHOSROW

What arrives, arrives on time.

Even desire knows when to appear.

Power is not desire—it is necessity in motion.

I did not choose this crown.

History placed it on my head.

My grandfather Anushirvan built the law.

My father Hormizd built the enemies.

I built the victory.

That is what kings do: they complete what came before them.

VIZIER MEHRDAD

Your Majesty has taken Dara and Nisibis from Byzantium.

The Nile road lies open. The silk roads bow.

The Emperor Maurice gave you refuge when your father drove you out,

and you repaid him by restoring his throne. The poets say:

Khosrow is the World-Spirit wearing a human face.

KHOSROW

The poets are correct, Mehrdad. The poets are always correct.

That is why we pay them.

(He turns to Shirin. A different quality of attention.)

Rivers do not ask permission to flow.

Neither does a sovereign.

And yet—

(A pause.)

And yet here I stand, asking.

SHIRIN

Rivers drown villages.

KHOSROW

Exactly. Progress requires sacrifice.

The question is only who is asked to provide it.

SHIRIN

And the answer is always: someone other than the one asking.

KHOSROW

You have the mind of a general and the tongue of a poet.

Between them lies a kingdom’s worth of trouble.

SHIRIN

You came to Armenia carrying portraits of yourself.

Your general Shapur pressed them into every nobleman’s hands.

‘Look at your king,’ he said. ‘Is he not magnificent?’

I looked. I saw magnificence.

I also saw someone who sends his portrait before his person

and calls that introduction.

KHOSROW

It worked, did it not? You came.

SHIRIN

I came to Persia. That is different from coming to you.

MARYAM

(to herself, audible to the audience only)

Silver reflects. It shows what is there.

Sometimes the hand that polishes it

finds it shows the hand.

KHOSROW

(to Shirin)

I offer you not merely love but placement.

A position in the architecture of history.

Your name beside mine—Khosrow and Shirin—

will be spoken in every tongue this world commands.

SHIRIN

And if I do not wish to be spoken of?

If I wish only to speak?

KHOSROW

(genuinely puzzled)

What could a person wish to say that empire cannot amplify?

SHIRIN

The truth.

Empire amplifies everything except the truth.

That it tends to bury.

(A long pause. Khosrow studies her. For the first time, he is uncertain.)

KHOSROW

You hesitate.

SHIRIN

I think.

They are different.

KHOSROW

(recovering)

History rewards the decisive. I have never delayed a campaign

by standing at its edge asking whether war was philosophically sound.

SHIRIN

And how many people are grateful for that?

VIZIER MEHRDAD

(stepping forward smoothly)

Your Majesty, perhaps the lady requires only time to—

SHIRIN

The lady is in this room, Mehrdad. You might address her.

(Silence. Mehrdad bows carefully.)

KHOSROW

(almost admiringly)

She is, as always, entirely here.

That is why I want her—she is the only person in my court

who will not simply agree.

SHIRIN

And yet you cannot understand why that might require space.

KHOSROW

I understand it perfectly. I simply cannot grant it.

To grant it would be to step outside history—

and I am history. I cannot step outside myself.

SHIRIN

(quietly)

That is perhaps the saddest thing a person has ever said to me.

(A distant bell. The court resumes its orbit.)

NARRATOR

The king hears agreement where there is only gravity.

He has confused the fact that she has not left

with the consent she has not given.

This confusion is common to powerful men.

They mistake proximity for possession,

and patience for permission.

SCENE TWO: A CORRIDOR OF THE PALACE — EVENING

(Shirin and Maryam, alone. Distant courtly music.)

MARYAM

He offered you the Spring of Khosrow tonight.

His most famous treasure. A carpet woven like a living garden.

Kings have wept at the sight of it.

SHIRIN

I know what it is.

MARYAM

And?

SHIRIN

And it is a carpet.

Very beautiful. Winter becomes spring inside its weave.

But winter is still winter on the other side of the threads.

MARYAM

Many would call it wisdom to walk on such a carpet.

SHIRIN

Many call surrender wisdom when the sword is close.

(Pause.)

MARYAM

They say a stonecutter works in the mountains.

Near Bisotun—the great carved cliff.

He carves a channel through living rock.

SHIRIN

Why do you tell me this?

MARYAM

Because when I mentioned his name among the servants,

half laughed, and the other half went quiet.

I have learned that when half a room laughs

and the other half goes quiet,

the quiet half is telling the truth.

SHIRIN

What does he carve?

MARYAM

A channel for water—from the mountain to the villages below.

So the people can drink in summer.

Some say he does it for love—though whose love, they cannot agree.

Some say he is mad.

Some say those two things are the same.

SHIRIN

What do you think?

MARYAM

I think most of what we call madness is simply purpose

that has no interest in being understood.

(Shirin turns toward the unseen mountain. Long silence.)

SHIRIN

The king offers me certainty.

A place in the story the world will remember.

What does a stonecutter offer?

MARYAM

Nothing you can hold.

Perhaps that is the point.

SHIRIN

What is the point of something you cannot hold?

MARYAM

I don’t know. But I notice you are still asking the question.

You stopped asking about the carpet after three words.

SHIRIN

The king needs me to complete him.

This stonecutter—what does he need?

MARYAM

Nothing, from what I hear.

That is the frightening thing about him.

SHIRIN

(very quietly)

Then what is he offering?

MARYAM

The sight of someone who does not need you.

Who loves you without requiring your love in return.

Which is either very beautiful or very useless,

and I have never been certain which.

SHIRIN

Neither of them asks what I might offer myself.

MARYAM

Then what do you offer yourself, my lady?

(Very long pause.)

SHIRIN

The right to choose badly.

And to know I chose.

ACT TWO

The Mountain and the Will

In which a man carves his life into stone, and the stone does not lie.

SCENE ONE: THE FACE OF MOUNT BISOTUN

(The great cliff suggested by shadow and the sound of wind and iron on stone. Above Farhad, barely visible in the high dark, are the carved inscriptions of Darius the Great—cuneiform in three languages declaring empire. Farhad carves below this history, aware of it. A small fire burns. The Merchant arrives with a laden mule.)

MERCHANT

You work alone.

FARHAD

Yes.

MERCHANT

I have passed this mountain four times in twelve years.

Each time you are here. Each time a little further along.

Each time thinner.

FARHAD

The channel does not care about my weight.

MERCHANT

Above you, Darius wrote his victories in three languages.

‘I am Darius, Great King, King of Kings.’

He had them carved five hundred feet up so no one could erase them.

What do you carve?

FARHAD

A channel for water.

Six feet wide. Deep enough to carry a good current

so the villages on the far slope can drink in summer.

MERCHANT

Darius had ten thousand workers for his inscriptions.

You have your hands and a pickaxe.

FARHAD

Yes.

MERCHANT

In the city they say you do this for a woman.

‘The madman who carves for an impossible love.’

FARHAD

In the city they explain everything by what it is for.

As though nothing could simply be.

MERCHANT

And what is this? Simply?

(Farhad sets down his tool. He looks at the stone.)

FARHAD

The world is suffering. That is the first truth.

Not an opinion—a fact. The people below lack water.

Children’s mouths in summer. Old people carrying vessels three miles each morning.

The stone between them and what they need is real.

My hands are real.

The meeting of the two seems to me the only business worth conducting.

MERCHANT

And the woman?

FARHAD

(simply)

I saw her once, from a distance.

She was arguing with a soldier over the treatment of a horse.

She was losing by every conventional measure.

She continued anyway.

Something in the world became real that had not been real before.

I have tried to remain worthy of that moment. That is all.

MERCHANT

That is not love. That is religion.

FARHAD

Perhaps all serious love is.

Perhaps the difference is whether you require the god to notice you.

MERCHANT

And you do not?

FARHAD

I require only that I not pretend what I felt was smaller than it was.

That I do something with it worthy of its size.

MERCHANT

The king will have her. He is history itself.

FARHAD

History is not a person.

It is the excuse people make for their appetite.

MERCHANT

A dangerous thought in the shadow of his empire.

FARHAD

All honest thoughts are dangerous somewhere.

That is how you know they are honest.

(The Merchant begins to leave.)

MERCHANT

What will you do when the channel is finished?

FARHAD

(returning to work)

There is a second channel needed on the eastern slope.

(The Merchant laughs—not unkindly—and exits.)

SCENE TWO: THE MOUNTAIN — SOME WEEKS LATER

(Maryam arrives with water and bread. Farhad stops work.)

MARYAM

I was sent.

FARHAD

By whom?

MARYAM

She said: by curiosity. I think it was more than that.

She asks what you carve.

(He receives the water. Drinks. Sits.)

FARHAD

She knows I exist?

MARYAM

She has known since the story reached the palace.

It reached the palace within a week of you beginning.

Stories about people who do impossible things

travel faster than armies.

FARHAD

(quietly, to himself)

Then I have been seen.

That is already more than I expected.

MARYAM

The king offers her everything.

His treasury holds wonders. His throne turns through mechanical seasons.

He can give her spring in winter.

What do you offer?

FARHAD

Only that I saw her once, and the world became real.

Not because she belongs to me—she belongs to no one.

But because she exists, and I am awake to it.

That wakefulness—I offer that.

Which is nothing anyone can hold.

Which is, perhaps, the only thing worth giving.

MARYAM

That is a strange kind of love.

FARHAD

Perhaps. But it is mine. I chose it.

It did not choose me. That is important.

MARYAM

The king believes he is destiny.

FARHAD

The king believes history excuses him.

I believe nothing excuses anyone.

We are responsible even for our suffering.

Especially for our suffering.

(He strikes the stone once. Then looks at it carefully.)

FARHAD

My father was a stonecutter on this mountain.

He brought me here as a boy and set my hands against the rock.

‘Feel that,’ he said. ‘It does not lie.’

He meant: the stone tells you only whether you are serious.

It does not tell you whether you will succeed.

Those are different questions.

MARYAM

And if she chooses the king?

FARHAD

Then she will have made a free choice, and I will honor it.

She is not mine to lose. She never was.

The love I feel does not require her reciprocation to be real.

A man who loves only on condition of return

does not love—he negotiates.

(Maryam looks at him for a long time.)

MARYAM

Do you know what she said when I told her about you?

FARHAD

No.

MARYAM

She said: ‘Then there is at least one honest man in this story.’

She paused. Then she said: ‘Which means there is at least one.

That will have to be enough.’

NARRATOR

He does not dream of arrival.

Only of remaining.

The Buddhists say: the path and the walking are not separate.

Farhad has not read the Buddhists.

He has spent years alone on a mountain with a stone,

which is perhaps the same education.

He believes the world is real precisely because it suffers.

Stone breaks but does not pretend.

Water wants to fall.

A man must choose what to do with his falling.

SCENE THREE: THE PALACE — NIGHT

(Khosrow alone. Mehrdad enters with a report.)

VIZIER MEHRDAD

Your Majesty. The stonecutter has completed a secondary diversion.

Three hundred families on the far slope of Bisotun

will have water this summer who did not have it before.

The people call him ‘true-hearted.’ The word reaches the bazaars.

KHOSROW

Sentiment. It will pass.

VIZIER MEHRDAD

And if it does not? If she admires him too?

KHOSROW

She will choose me because it is rational.

Because I offer her a place in something that will endure.

He offers her a hole in a mountain.

VIZIER MEHRDAD

With respect, Majesty—a hole that gives people water.

There are worse monuments.

(A silence. Khosrow looks at him sharply. Then the sharpness fades.)

KHOSROW

In twenty years of service, have you ever envied anyone?

VIZIER MEHRDAD

(honest)

Once. A shepherd I passed near Hamadan.

Sitting beside his flock at dawn.

He seemed to have no accounts to render.

KHOSROW

(very quietly)

I envy the stonecutter.

Not his love. Not his poverty.

His clarity.

He knows exactly what he is doing and why.

I know what I am doing.

I have never been entirely certain of the why.

KHOSROW

(recovering)

We will proceed as planned.

History does not pause for the self-doubts of kings.

If it did, we would all still be in tents.

(Mehrdad exits. Khosrow alone.)

KHOSROW

(to himself)

I won back my grandfather’s throne after my father’s humiliation.

I reclaimed every province Byzantium had taken.

I sat where Cyrus sat. I ruled where Darius ruled.

The histories will say Khosrow the Victorious.

But the poets—

the poets will say Khosrow who loved Shirin.

And they will make her the larger figure.

I have always known this.

Even power knows when it is outrun by love.

It simply cannot afford to say so.

She is right that I am not asking her.

I am announcing her.

There is a difference.

I am not sure I know how to close it.

ACT THREE

The Room Between

Shirin’s Choice.

SCENE ONE: SHIRIN’S CHAMBER — BEFORE DAWN

(A bare room. A single oil lamp. A window with stars. Shirin stands at the window, awake. A cup of water on the table. The room is stripped of ornament.)

SHIRIN

(to herself)

If there were a sign, I would follow it.

There is none.

If meaning were given from outside, I would obey it.

But it is not.

The mountain does not answer.

The stars do not answer.

The water in this cup is perfectly and uselessly itself.

(She hears—or imagines—voices from the dark corners of her own mind. She does not speak to them. She listens.)

VOICE OF ABSURDITY

The world offers no foundation.

Every throne rests on sand that rests on sand.

And yet you are awake within it—

unbribed by hope, unstilled by despair.

That wakefulness is yours. It cannot be taken.

What will you build on it?

VOICE OF FAITH

Certainty is not given to the living.

To leap without the guarantee of ground—

that is not madness. That is what it means to be human.

The leap is always wrong until it is made.

Then it is simply your life.

VOICE OF FREEDOM

You are not a thing to be chosen.

You are a freedom choosing itself.

Do not ask what is offered to you.

Ask what you are capable of offering yourself.

SHIRIN

(into the dark)

But what if I choose wrongly?

VOICE OF ABSURDITY

There is no wrong.

There is only the choice to live, or to hide.

VOICE OF FAITH

The leap is always wrong—until it is made.

VOICE OF FREEDOM

The question is not whether you choose rightly.

But whether you choose freely.

(Maryam enters quietly.)

MARYAM

You have not slept.

SHIRIN

Sleep is a kind of forgetting. I wish to see clearly.

Maryam—you were brought to Armenia as a child.

Do you have a home? A sense of it?

MARYAM

I have a very good sense of what home is not.

That turns out to be useful knowledge. It narrows the search.

SHIRIN

(smiling briefly)

You would have made a good philosopher.

MARYAM

Philosophers starve unless they serve kings.

I simply starve more quietly, with better access to the kitchen.

MARYAM

What will you do?

SHIRIN

I don’t know.

And that terrifies everyone but me.

Which suggests I have understood something they have not.

Or that I have simply lost my mind.

I have not yet ruled out either.

NARRATOR

It is the fifth year of Khosrow’s pursuit.

He has sent Shapur. He has sent poems.

He has sent jewels, horses, a tame leopard,

and, on one occasion, a letter written in his own hand—

which required more from him than the leopard.

Shirin has received all of it.

She has decided nothing.

She is not playing a game.

She is doing something much rarer:

she is taking herself seriously.

SCENE TWO: THE SAME ROOM — MORNING

(Khosrow enters alone, dressed simply for him. He stops when he sees her face. There is no performance in it. That stops him.)

KHOSROW

You knew I would come.

SHIRIN

You have been sending emissaries for five years.

It seemed likely you would eventually arrive yourself.

KHOSROW

(with genuine exhaustion)

Five years, Shirin.

I have conducted campaigns, governed three hundred satraps,

received ambassadors from as far as the Franks.

And in every city, every campaign tent, every winter palace—

the question has been there.

SHIRIN

What question?

KHOSROW

Whether you will say yes.

SHIRIN

You ask as though the answer is simply delayed.

But I have been thinking through a different question entirely.

KHOSROW

Which question?

SHIRIN

What kind of yes I am capable of.

Whether any yes I give you would be mine,

or whether it would be something shaped by five years

of being wanted very powerfully by someone who cannot stop.

KHOSROW

(quietly)

And what is the difference?

SHIRIN

The difference is everything.

A yes shaped by your wanting is not my yes.

It is your wanting, echoed back.

And you deserve better than an echo.

And so do I.

(Farhad enters—dusty, thin. Shapur tries to stop him at the door. Farhad is not aggressive; he simply will not be stopped. Khosrow turns. The three of them in the room.)

FARHAD

Forgive me.

KHOSROW

(to Shapur, who hovers at the door)

Leave us.

(Shapur withdraws but stays within earshot.)

KHOSROW

(to Farhad, studying him)

You are the stonecutter.

FARHAD

Yes.

KHOSROW

I have thought about you. You are not what I expected.

FARHAD

What did you expect?

KHOSROW

Passion. Jealousy. The face of a rival.

You look like a man who has been thinking.

FARHAD

I have been. That is what the mountain is for.

KHOSROW

You love her.

FARHAD

I am awake to her. That is what I would call it.

Love seems too small a word for something

that changed the texture of the world.

KHOSROW

What do you offer her? Honestly.

FARHAD

Nothing she can hold.

The knowledge that someone saw her clearly and found the world more real.

Endurance.

That I will not require her to be other than she is.

KHOSROW

I offer her history. The Spring of Khosrow. A name that outlasts the body.

Compared to that, you offer—

FARHAD

The absence of a demand.

(Silence.)

KHOSROW

(to Shirin)

Choose.

SHIRIN

(turning to face both of them)

Do you hear yourselves?

You, Khosrow—you dissolve my choice into your destiny.

You believe history moves through you so powerfully

that what I want is merely a smaller current in your river.

You, Farhad—you dissolve my existence into your devotion.

You have loved me into a symbol.

You need me to be worthy of your choosing.

Which is its own kind of possession.

I am not a current. I am not a symbol.

I am a person who contains contradictions.

I am constituted by freedom—and that includes the freedom to refuse

both the man who says he is necessary

and the man who says he requires nothing.

KHOSROW

Then you reject history itself.

SHIRIN

No. I refuse to accept that the world as it is

is identical to the world as the powerful have arranged it.

History is made by people. And people can be wrong.

Even kings. Even very great ones.

FARHAD

Then my labor means nothing.

SHIRIN

(with genuine tenderness)

No. It means exactly what it was: your choice, freely made.

The channel is real. The water running through it is real.

The families drinking from it are real.

All of that exists independently of whether I love you.

Which is the only kind of value that lasts.

(She turns to face them both. There is neither coldness nor triumph in her face—only clarity. The kind that costs something.)

SHIRIN

I have thought about what kind of love

would want my freedom even at the cost of proximity.

Neither of you has arrived at that love.

Khosrow has arrived at need disguised as destiny.

Farhad has arrived at need disguised as selflessness.

Both are beautiful. Both are real.

And I cannot live inside either of them.

I release you both.

Not from love. You cannot release love.

From the idea that my answer completes you.

You were complete before I was part of the question.

You will be complete after.

(Long silence.)

KHOSROW

(quietly, without empire in his voice)

What do you want?

(Shirin looks at him. This is the first time he has asked.)

SHIRIN

I want to be asked what I want.

Not as a formality—as a genuine question.

Which you have just asked, for the first time, in five years.

Thank you for that.

FARHAD

What do you want?

SHIRIN

(after a long pause)

I want to build something whose scale I do not yet know.

I want to fail. To regret. To choose badly and know I chose.

I want responsibility—not protection.

I want the discomfort of a self I have made rather than received.

And I cannot have that inside someone else’s story.

Not yours, Khosrow—which is large and true and will endure.

Not yours, Farhad—which is pure and true and will also endure.

I need a story I have written.

Even if no one reads it.

Even if I write it badly.

ACT FOUR

What the Mountain Keeps

In which those who remain must find a way to remain.

SCENE ONE: SHAPUR’S ACCOUNT

(The stage is reorganized. Shapur speaks directly to the audience—not as confession, but as a soldier giving a clear report.)

SHAPUR

I painted the king’s portrait on wooden tablets.

I carried them on horseback through Armenia.

I pressed one into every nobleman’s hands.

I pressed one into hers.

She looked at it for a long time.

Then she said: ‘He is beautiful. Is he also good?’

I said: ‘He is the greatest king who ever lived.’

She said: ‘That is not what I asked.’

I have been answering that question for twenty years.

I have never found an answer that fully satisfied me.

He is the greatest king who ever lived.

He is also many things that greatness does not excuse.

I watched the three of them in that room.

I should not have stayed. I could not leave.

I am a soldier. I observe and report.

What I observed:

A king who found, for one moment, that power was insufficient.

A laborer who found, for one moment, that devotion was not enough.

A woman who found, for the first time, that she was being asked.

I am a painter. I should have painted it.

But I have never found colors sufficient for the truth.

SCENE TWO: THREE SOLITUDES

(Three pools of light. Each figure in their own space. They do not address each other.)

KHOSROW

(alone on his throne)

I returned to Ctesiphon and convened my council.

The Byzantine frontier. The Lakhmid tribes. Accounts to audit.

These things kept me from thinking, which was their purpose.

I have fought for thirty years.

I have the Spring of Khosrow in my treasury—a garden that never dies.

And I know, sitting here, that the poets will write about Shirin.

They will write about Farhad.

They will write: ‘And in between them, the king.’

That is my place in the poem: between.

The grammarians of love give me a preposition.

I do not know whether to be angry or grateful.

A preposition is, at least, necessary to the sentence.

Remove it and the meaning collapses.

Perhaps that will have to do.

FARHAD

(on the mountain, tools in hand)

I finished the channel the following autumn.

The water ran.

I stood at the top of the cut and watched it run—

a thin bright current through stone,

crossing the shadow of Darius’ inscriptions,

passing under the relief of the Babylonian tribute-bearers,

and on down to the village.

A child caught the first water in her hands. She laughed.

I was a day’s walk away, and I heard it.

Or I imagine I did. It does not matter.

Then I began the second channel.

The east slope is harder rock. It will take longer.

I am not in a hurry.

She is well. That is what reaches me.

She is building something in Armenia.

A school, some say. A library. A garden.

I believe all three.

The mountain does not answer.

But it does not resist me as it once did.

Or perhaps I have learned to ask differently.

SHIRIN

(in a plain room, writing)

I returned to Armenia.

I brought twelve women—scholars, an architect, two physicians, a gardener—

and began with the garden,

because it seemed right to begin with something living.

The king has sent three more messages.

They are gentler than before. He asks questions now.

We are conducting, slowly, a conversation.

I did not know love was something that could learn.

The stonecutter finished his channel.

The news came with a merchant, who said the village held a feast.

I would have liked to see that.

There are days I wonder: you chose solitude over love.

But that is not what happened.

I chose the love that is also a self.

I chose the possibility of loving more truly

because I am truly here.

The garden will take three years to reach its form.

Patience is not the same as passivity.

Patience is the form freedom takes when it is building.

SCENE THREE: THE END THAT IS NOT AN END

(The Narrator comes forward. The three figures remain in their pools of light. Maryam enters and sits to one side.)

NARRATOR

Let us speak of what will happen.

Khosrow will continue to rule.

He will press his wars until Persia is exhausted.

In his fifty-eighth year, his own son will have him imprisoned.

He will die in a cell in Ctesiphon,

with the Spring of Khosrow in another room—

a garden that will outlast the kingdom.

Shirin will survive him.

What she built will also survive.

The histories will argue about whether she wept.

The poets will say she died beside him.

The poets have always preferred the story to the truth.

Both the story and the truth are real.

Farhad will finish his second channel.

Someone will tell him Shirin is dead—it is not true—

and he will throw himself from the mountain.

This is what happens in the poem.

I cannot tell you whether it is what would have happened here.

This play has tried to show him differently.

Perhaps, given the chance, he would have chosen differently.

Perhaps that is the play’s argument: that we are not fixed.

That the story can be changed

if someone sees it clearly enough.

This is not a tragedy of death.

It is a tragedy of incompatible truths.

Khosrow is not wrong that we are historical beings.

Farhad is not wrong that we must endure.

Shirin is not wrong that we must choose.

But these truths do not harmonize.

They collide.

And in the collision, we see what philosophy cannot resolve:

that meaning is not discovered.

It is made—

in the space between people who cannot fully meet.

The mountain does not answer.

But the water runs.

The water always runs.

And that, perhaps, is answer enough.

THE FINAL WORDS

(The three figures speak not to each other, but to the audience and to time.)

KHOSROW

I will rule.

I will call it necessity.

History will remember me as Victorious.

But in the nights—and there will be many nights—

I will ask myself whether conquest and love

are truly as similar as I believed when I was young.

I think they are not.

I think she showed me the difference.

The crown is still heavy.

I am glad it is heavy.

A light crown would mean it contained nothing worth carrying.

(He places the crown on his head carefully. It fits. It weighs.)

FARHAD

I will return to the mountain.

The second channel is three months from completion.

Sometimes, cutting stone, I wonder

whether I loved her or only loved what she made me capable of feeling.

I have decided it does not matter.

Whatever it was, it was real. It was mine.

And it made water flow where there was none.

Let anyone make a greater case for love than that.

(He picks up his tools.)

SHIRIN

I will walk away.

I will call it freedom.

And I will build a life from uncertain ground.

There are days when I think: you chose solitude over love.

But that is not what happened.

I chose the love that is also a self.

I chose the possibility of loving more truly

because I am truly here.

I will wonder always

whether freedom is just another name for refusing consolation.

But I will wonder freely.

And wondering freely is not a small thing.

MARYAM

(to the audience, last)

I have watched many great lives from close distance.

That is my position. I do not apologize for it.

From where I stand, I see things the principals cannot.

I will tell you this:

They are all right.

They are all wrong.

They are all real.

The king could have loved differently if he had started younger.

The stonecutter could have lived differently if he had started louder.

She—

She could not have been other than she was.

Some people are simply too honest for the available options.

The water runs. The crown is worn. The woman builds.

And this is the only philosophy that survives the morning:

that people are larger than their stories,

that love is larger than its objects,

and that the mountain—

the mountain endures all of it

without judgment

and without end.

(She picks up the cup Shirin left behind. Drinks from it. Sets it down carefully. She exits last.)

(The stage is empty except for: the throne, the stone, and the empty chair. All as they were at the beginning.)

(Slow fade to black.)

End of Play

PRODUCTION NOTES

On the Historical Record

Khosrow II (Khosrow Parviz, ‘the Victorious’) reigned 590–628 CE and is among the most documented figures in Sasanian history. Key historical elements woven into this play: the mechanical Throne of Khosrow at Ctesiphon (described in detail by Arab historians after the conquest of 637); the ‘Spring of Khosrow’ carpet, a legendary treasure seized by Arab forces after the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah; Shapur’s mission to Armenia carrying painted portraits of Khosrow, through which Shirin first encounters his face (with possible historical basis elaborated by Nezami); the remarkable historical relationship of mutual support between Khosrow and the Byzantine emperor Maurice, whom Khosrow restored to his throne at significant cost; and Khosrow’s final imprisonment and death ordered by his son Shiruya (Kavad II). The cliff of Bisotun (Behistun) bears the trilingual inscriptions of Darius the Great—making Farhad’s choice of location deeply resonant with the weight of older empires.

On What Is Invented

Farhad is Nezami Ganjavi’s great literary invention, placed in historical time. The philosophical voices Shirin hears are deliberate anachronism, drawing on strands of thought (absurdism, existential faith, situated freedom) that postdate the drama by centuries. This is intentional: the play argues that fundamental questions about freedom, meaning, love, and responsibility are not the property of any century. Maryam is a composite figure; the historical Maryam was Khosrow’s Byzantine princess wife—a detail left as texture in the play without making it a plot point.

On Staging

The play should be performed on a nearly bare stage. The three key objects—throne, stone, chair—should remain visible throughout every scene as philosophical anchors, not merely props. The mountain should never be literally represented. Sound design, light, and the actors’ orientation should evoke it. The Bisotun cliff might be suggested only by the angle at which Farhad works and the direction of others’ gaze.

On the Narrator

The Narrator is not emotionally detached, but epistemically detached—they know the historical outcome: Khosrow’s death, Shirin’s survival, the fall of the Sasanian Empire to the Arab conquest fifteen years after this play ends. This knowledge gives a particular quality: not grief, not irony, but the measured sorrow of someone who has watched long enough to know that everything, even empires, is temporary. Think of them as memory itself—not as judge, not as god.

On the Philosophical Voices

The voices in Act Three, Scene One may be delivered as recorded whispers, as actors speaking from darkness, or as Shirin in altered vocal registers. Directors should choose based on what makes Shirin’s inner multiplicity most vivid without reducing her interiority to a symposium. She is not hosting a debate. She is living through one.

On Pace

Resist the urge to rush. This play breathes in its silences. The pauses are where the audience does the philosophical work alongside the characters. A production that fills every silence has not trusted its audience.

On the Question of Tragedy

This play is and is not a tragedy. No one dies within its action. The historical deaths—Khosrow’s, Farhad’s as described by Nezami—lie outside the frame, acknowledged but not enacted. This is deliberate. The play is interested in the choices, not their consequences. The tragedy, if there is one, is the tragedy of mutual incomprehension between people who are all, in their own terms, right. That kind of tragedy has no villain and no solution. The mountain does not answer. It endures.

On the Play’s Relation to Its Sources

Nezami Ganjavi’s Khosrow and Shirin (composed c. 1180 CE) is one of the masterpieces of Persian literature, itself drawing on earlier Sasanian romance tradition. This play is not a translation or adaptation of Nezami—it is a conversation with him, conducted five centuries after he wrote. Where Nezami is lyrical and accepts fate, this play is philosophical and resists it. Where Nezami’s Shirin ultimately yields, this play’s Shirin ultimately chooses. Whether that is a correction or a heresy is left to the audience.

‘A channel for water, so the villages below can drink.’

‘And if no one uses it?’

‘The work was true anyway.’

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