The Apartment on Mirdamad Boulevard
A Political-Philosophical Play in Two Acts and Three Possible Truths
"In every revolution there is one man who asks for a glass of water and one who shoots him for counterrevolutionary thirst."
— Attributed to no one in particular, which is why it remains true.
BEFORE THE CURTAIN
Prologue & Dramatis Personae
The stage is almost bare.
Almost.
There is a single apartment: a modest sitting room in Tehran, 1975.
The room is neither poor nor prosperous. It possesses the exhausted dignity of a place inhabited by someone who has spent years postponing a departure.
A window stands stage left. Beyond it, the city occasionally flickers into existence: distant headlights, a neon sign that cannot decide whether to survive the night, the glow of an apartment across the boulevard where strangers are living lives no less complicated and no more comprehensible than those we are about to witness.
A telephone rests on a small table.
Two glasses.
An opened bottle.
A bookshelf crowded with French paperbacks whose spines have been turned inward, as though the books have entered into a conspiracy with their owner.
A framed photograph lies face down.
A door secured by too many locks.
The room is never fully illuminated.
Shadows are not a theatrical effect in this play.
They are part of the architecture.
The audience should have the impression that the apartment has been waiting.
Not merely for the people who inhabit it.
For something.
Or perhaps for someone.
Before the house lights dim, the DIRECTOR enters in ordinary clothes.
He carries no script.
He carries no visible authority except the temporary authority granted to whoever speaks first.
He looks around the apartment as though confirming that it still exists.
Then he turns to the audience.
THE DIRECTOR
(to the audience)
Ladies and gentlemen.
You are about to watch a play set in Iran during the 1970s.
Some of you know this history.
Some of you do not.
This will matter less than you think.
The play is not about history.
History merely provides the furniture.
The play is about memory.
About disappointment.
About loyalty.
About betrayal.
About the stories nations tell themselves after they have done something they would prefer not to remember.
Most of all, it is about guilt.
Not the guilt we confess.
The guilt we inherit.
The guilt that survives the people who earned it.
The guilt that moves into apartments and waits patiently for new tenants.
History, contrary to popular belief, rarely arrives dressed as history.
It arrives as a telephone call.
A delayed letter.
A knock at the door after midnight.
A conversation interrupted too soon.
A person who should have chosen differently and did not.
At the centre of everything is a woman named Sanaz Esfandiari.
She is thirty-one years old.
She is beautiful, which the world has mistaken for permission.
She is intelligent, which the world has mistaken for defiance.
She is the daughter of a man who believed in liberty loudly enough to be exiled for it and quietly enough that his daughter spent most of her life growing up without him.
For two years she has loved a man who never quite noticed that she was loving him.
Not because he was cruel.
Cruelty requires attention.
He simply did not see her.
Last week he married another woman.
This fact has nothing whatsoever to do with politics.
Which is precisely why it has everything to do with politics.
History enters nations through armies and parliaments.
It enters human beings through loneliness.
Sanaz now lives alone in this apartment, in a city that is prosperous, frightened, ambitious, exhausted, and quietly preparing to become something else.
The city does not know this yet.
Neither does she.
Tonight someone will knock on her door.
The knock will sound ordinary.
Almost every catastrophe begins that way.
What happens afterward depends on which truth you choose to believe.
The difficulty is that all three truths are true.
And all three are lies.
But before we begin, let us meet the people who have already entered the story without realising it.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
The Characters
SANAZ ESFANDIARI
Thirty-one.
Daughter of Brigadier-General Esfandiari (retired, exiled), who attended the military academy alongside the Shah and now directs a dissident network from a cramped Paris apartment whose address changes more frequently than his political convictions.
Sanaz remained behind.
She works as executive administrator at a Tehran trading company, where she has spent years cultivating a reputation for competence, dignity, and emotional self-sufficiency.
Maintaining this reputation requires almost all of her strength.
She reads Jalal Al-e Ahmad.
She reads Nima Yushij.
She underlines passages she disagrees with and memorizes passages she wishes she had written.
She has not written to her father in four months.
She tells herself this is because she is angry.
She suspects it is because she is afraid.
She lives alone.
The apartment keeps her company.
Neither of them discusses it.
ARMAN
(Scenario I)
Twenty-nine.
Former university classmate of Sanaz.
Now an operative within the People's Fedayeen.
He arrives wounded.
He appears to be fleeing SAVAK.
He is not what he appears to be.
His exhaustion is genuine.
His fear is genuine.
Even his affection may be genuine.
Only his loyalty is counterfeit.
For months he has informed on comrades, acquaintances, and strangers whose names happened to become useful.
He arrives carrying instructions, secrets, and the precise coordinates of her father's network in Paris.
He believes these things matter.
By the end of the story he will discover that something else matters more.
Whether this discovery redeems him is not for him to decide.
KOUROSH
(Scenario II)
Thirty-two.
Another university classmate.
A socialist organiser.
An idealist.
The sort of man capable of delivering a forty-minute speech at three in the morning and then apologising because he believes he has not been sufficiently concise.
He believes history is moving toward justice.
He believes people are fundamentally good.
He believes reformers prevent revolutions from staying true to their founding ideals.".
The audience may decide for themselves which of these beliefs is least realistic.
He carries two photographs in his breast pocket.
One depicts his mother.
The other depicts Mosaddegh.
Both photographs have accompanied him longer than most of his convictions.
Neither will protect him.
DARYUSH
(Scenario III)
Age uncertain.
Possibly thirty.
Possibly sixty.
Possibly neither.
He speaks sometimes as a Marxist revolutionary, sometimes as a religious dissident, sometimes as a weary observer who no longer trusts either language.
He remembers events that have not yet occurred.
He mourns people who are still alive.
He knows the names of prisoners not yet arrested.
This is not entirely madness.
Or rather, it is exactly madness.
Which is why it may also be something else.
When he enters a room, time becomes less confident about itself.
THE VOICE OF MEHRDAD
Chief Executive Officer.
Never appears onstage.
He is heard only once, during a telephone conversation.
His absence exerts more influence than many people's presence.
He is the gravitational centre of a wound he does not know he inflicted.
The audience never sees him.
This is appropriate.
Many of the most important forces in human life remain invisible.
THE DIRECTOR
Himself.
Or someone claiming to be himself.
Not technically a character in the fiction.
Or perhaps the only character in the fiction who knows he is fictional.
He begins the play believing he controls the narrative.
The narrative disagrees.
By the third scenario, the disagreement becomes difficult to ignore.
Like everyone else in the play, he is attempting to understand what happened.
Unlike everyone else, he has the advantage of pretending he already does.
ACT I
Scenes 1 Through 4
What the Apartment Remembers
The apartment remembers many things.
It remembers arguments that ended friendships.
It remembers telephone calls that ended marriages.
It remembers promises made sincerely and broken sincerely.
It remembers secrets.
Apartments always do.
The difficulty is that they remember without understanding, and understanding without judgment is often the cruelest form of memory.
Scene 1 — The Newspaper
9:00 p.m.
Sanaz sits alone at the table, still wearing the clothes she wore to work.
The apartment around her is silent in the particular way apartments become silent after a disappointment. Not empty. Not peaceful. Merely attentive.
Before her lies an open newspaper.
Her eyes remain fixed on the social announcements page.
She has already read the announcement.
She reads it again.
Then again.
Not because she doubts its truth.
Because she does not.
Slowly, carefully, she folds the newspaper.
The gesture possesses the tenderness one reserves for a wound and the precision one reserves for a weapon.
She places it in the centre of the table.
A small monument.
A small grave.
She pours herself a drink.
The glass catches the light.
She studies it.
Then studies it longer.
She does not drink.
SANAZ
(to no one; almost a whisper)
He could have told me himself.
That is all.
That is the only thing I asked of him without ever asking.
That he would tell me himself.
Silence.
The telephone does not ring.
The city outside continues existing without consulting her.
She picks up the glass.
Sets it down.
Picks it up again.
This time she drinks.
SANAZ
Two years.
(Pause.)
Two years of being the person he trusted with everything except the thing that mattered.
She unfolds the newspaper.
Reads the announcement once more.
Her expression does not change.
This is more disturbing than if it did.
A woman weeping can be comforted.
A woman who has finished weeping is a different matter.
Scene 2 — The Telephone Call
The telephone rings.
Sanaz does not move.
It rings again.
And again.
And again.
On the fourth ring she answers.
SANAZ
Yes.
(Pause.)
I saw.
(Longer pause.)
No, Mehrdad, I am not upset.
Why would I be upset?
(Pause.)
Of course I wish you happiness.
That is what a person says.
(Pause.)
No.
I said I was happy for you.
I was very clear.
She listens.
Her free hand closes slowly around the folded newspaper.
The paper crumples.
Only slightly.
SANAZ
What I find extraordinary, Mehrdad—not hurtful, extraordinary—is that you are calling me now to explain.
As if explanation is what I needed.
As if I had spent two years waiting not for you, but for an account of yourself.
(Pause.)
No, that is not fair.
Fairness has nothing to do with it.
(Pause.)
Goodnight.
She returns the receiver to its cradle with the care of someone who would very much prefer to throw it through a wall.
For a long moment she sits motionless.
Then she rises and crosses to the window.
The city glows beyond the glass.
Millions of lives.
Millions of private disappointments.
Millions of people certain their grief is unique.
SANAZ
My father used to say that in this country a woman has two choices.
She can be invisible.
Or she can be useful.
The difference is only in who is doing the ignoring.
Below, the sounds of Tehran drift upward.
Traffic.
A radio.
A barking dog.
Someone laughing.
A distant argument.
Ordinary sounds.
The sounds of a city that has not yet decided what it is about to become.
Scene 3 — The Photograph
Sanaz crosses to the bookshelf.
Among the hidden books is a framed photograph.
Unlike the books, it faces inward by choice.
She removes it.
Looks at it.
A formal portrait.
Her father.
Brigadier-General Esfandiari.
Beside him stands a younger man.
The audience recognises him immediately.
The Shah.
Both men are smiling.
Both men are young.
Both appear entirely incapable of becoming the people history will require them to become.
SANAZ
You were classmates.
You ate in the same dining hall.
Complained about the same instructors.
Argued about football.
Borrowed one another's notes.
Then one of you became a king.
And one of you became a criminal.
And I became the criminal's daughter.
Which means I became something that requires explanation.
She studies the photograph.
SANAZ
Do you know what is strange?
Neither of you looks surprised.
History always looks inevitable in photographs.
Everyone appears to know what is coming.
No one ever does.
She places the photograph back upon the shelf.
Face down.
Like a body.
Like evidence.
Like a prayer she no longer knows how to say.
She picks up the full glass.
Crosses to the window.
After a long moment she drains it in a single deliberate swallow.
SANAZ
Paris.
He writes from Paris about networks.
Committees.
Meetings.
The movement.
The struggle.
The necessary sacrifice.
I write back about leaking pipes and electricity bills.
He describes history.
I describe the apartment.
(Pause.)
I think we are describing the same thing.
We simply cannot agree on what is real about it.
Outside, a siren sounds briefly in the distance.
Then disappears.
The apartment listens.
Scene 4 — The Knock
Just before midnight.
Sanaz has changed into a house robe.
A book rests open in her lap.
She is reading.
Or pretending to.
Three knocks.
Quiet.
Uneven.
The knock of someone who does not wish to be heard by the neighbours.
Sanaz freezes.
The apartment freezes with her.
Silence.
Then three more knocks.
Softer.
More urgent.
She places her book aside.
Crosses to the door.
Stops.
SANAZ
(at the door; not opening it)
Who is it?
Silence.
Then a voice.
Thin.
Strained.
Familiar in the way voices from another life are familiar.
Not remembered.
Recognised.
VOICE BEYOND THE DOOR
Sanaz.
It's—
(Pause.)
We were at university together.
I sat behind you in Shahriar's philosophy seminar.
I argued that Hegel was wrong about history.
You said I had confused Hegel with my own ambitions.
(Pause.)
You were right.
Please open the door.
A long silence.
Sanaz places her hand upon the first lock.
Then the second.
Then the third.
The city outside continues making its ordinary sounds.
The apartment waits.
The audience waits.
History waits.
Blackout.
END OF ACT I
What follows depends upon who stands outside the door.
And upon what they have brought with them.
And upon what they have not yet admitted they are carrying.
The play pauses.
The Director returns.
BETWEEN ACTS
The Director Addresses the House
The lights rise slightly.
The figure beyond the door remains visible only in silhouette.
A human outline.
Nothing more.
The DIRECTOR enters from the wings.
He carries nothing.
He offers no apology for interrupting.
THE DIRECTOR
We are about to open that door.
This presents a difficulty.
The difficulty is not that there are too many possibilities.
The difficulty is that there are exactly three.
And all of them are true.
Or none of them are.
The distinction is less important than philosophers pretend.
Behind that door stands a fugitive.
A classmate.
Someone who once believed the future belonged to him.
Someone who was young with her when being young still felt like an argument against history rather than evidence for it.
There are three things that might be true.
In the first, the traitor is already inside the room.
He merely arrived wearing someone else's face.
In the second, the traitor has been inside the room from the beginning.
She has been waiting for precisely this test and failing it deliberately.
In the third, the room itself is lying.
The year is wrong.
The city is wrong.
The century may be wrong.
Everything outside those walls has already happened.
Only she remains uninformed.
You will choose.
I will perform only the future you select.
This is, admittedly, a small democracy in a play largely concerned with the failure of larger ones.
I offer no apology for the irony.
Only a request.
Whatever future you choose, remember that the other two remain possible.
They continue unfolding elsewhere.
In another apartment.
In another city.
In another version of memory.
Perhaps in this very room.
Perhaps tonight.
The silhouette beyond the door does not move.
The audience votes.
Which truth shall we open the door into?
Scenario I
The Informant Who Wanted Redemption
The fugitive was already the trap.
Scenario II
Sanaz Was the Hunter All Along
The sanctuary was already the cage.
Scenario III
The Revolution Never Happened
The apartment is memory. The year is wrong.
Select a scenario above to proceed to Act II.
ACT II — SCENARIO I
The Informant Who Wanted Redemption
Staging Note
In this version of the story, the fugitive's name is Arman.
The actor must resist the temptation to play him as a villain.
Villains simplify the audience's task.
Arman must remain difficult.
His warmth is genuine.
His fear is genuine.
His guilt is genuine.
Even his betrayal is genuine.
The tragedy is not that he has no conscience.
The tragedy is that he possesses one.
The audience should slowly sense that something in him is being performed—not because he is insincere, but because he has rehearsed survival for so long that sincerity and performance have become indistinguishable.
When the truth emerges, it should not feel like revelation.
It should feel like memory.
As though the audience had noticed every warning and chosen, out of kindness, not to interpret them correctly.
The apartment, meanwhile, should become subtly more intimate with each passing scene.
It is no longer merely shelter.
It is becoming a witness.
And witnesses, unlike participants, remember everything.
Scene 1 — First Night
The locks open.
The door swings inward.
Arman enters.
He is thinner than memory.
One sleeve is dark with dried blood.
A wound has been wrapped with a torn strip of shirt that has long since surrendered its battle against the bleeding.
His eyes move through the room before they move toward Sanaz.
Door.
Window.
Telephone.
Bookshelf.
Second window.
Only then the woman standing before him.
A habit learned from fear.
Or from training.
Sometimes they are the same thing.
For a moment neither speaks.
The years between university and now stand awkwardly in the room with them.
Sanaz notices the wound.
The exhaustion.
The way he does not quite meet her eyes.
She notices all of it.
Comments on none of it.
She disappears into the kitchen and returns carrying a bowl of warm water and a clean cloth.
She kneels beside him.
Begins cleaning the wound.
The intimacy surprises them both.
ARMAN
I did not know where else to go.
(Pause.)
That is not a very good reason.
I know that.
SANAZ
No.
But it is an honest one.
She cleans the wound carefully.
Neither of them looks at the other.
SANAZ
Hegel was right about history, by the way.
You simply disliked the conclusion.
A faint laugh escapes him.
The movement pulls at the wound.
He winces.
ARMAN
I still dislike it.
History does not move toward freedom.
It moves toward the next administration of the same cruelty.
SANAZ
Then why are you still participating?
He considers answering.
Finds no answer he believes.
She notices.
Says nothing.
Sometimes silence is a form of mercy.
She finishes dressing the wound.
Moves toward the kitchen.
The kettle begins to boil.
The silence between them is not uncomfortable.
It is worse than uncomfortable.
It is familiar.
The silence of two people who once had a conversation so honest it frightened them both.
Scene 2 — Three Nights In
Late.
The city has quieted.
Not completely.
Cities never do.
But enough that individual sounds become visible.
A distant engine.
A barking dog.
The hum of electricity passing through buildings full of sleeping people.
Sanaz and Arman sit beside the window smoking.
Below them Tehran stretches into darkness.
Arman watches the street with the concentration of a man reading a language he has learned to fear.
ARMAN
Do you ever think about leaving?
Your father is in Paris.
He would help you.
SANAZ
My father is in Paris explaining to committees of European socialists why Iran is not yet ready for democracy.
He has been explaining it for three years.
He will continue explaining it for another three.
Very eloquently.
Meanwhile I take shorthand for a man who married a woman he met in a bar.
(Pause.)
I am already in Paris, Arman.
I am simply trapped inside Tehran while I am there.
A faint smile touches his face.
ARMAN
I envy that.
The ability to be nowhere deliberately.
SANAZ
It is not an ability.
It is a habit.
There is a difference.
A long silence.
Then:
ARMAN
May I use the telephone?
A coded call.
Sanaz nods.
SANAZ
Of course.
She rises.
Walks toward the bedroom.
Stops briefly at the doorway.
Looks back.
For an instant she seems about to ask something.
Instead she disappears into the room.
The audience hears the dial turning.
A number.
Then another.
Arman's voice changes.
The warmth vanishes.
The hesitation vanishes.
The uncertainty vanishes.
His voice becomes precise.
Administrative.
Professional.
A man performing a task.
A Paris address is spoken quietly.
Brigadier-General Esfandiari's address.
The audience hears it.
Sanaz does not.
Or perhaps she does.
The apartment certainly does.
Scene 4 — The Poem
Rain.
The fourth night.
The sound against the windows resembles fingers searching for entry.
Arman's fever has worsened.
Sanaz sits beside him.
Changing cloths.
Checking his temperature.
The sort of care that cannot be performed impersonally.
Half-conscious, Arman begins speaking.
At first she thinks he is dreaming.
Then she recognises the poem.
Nima Yushij.
The poet she loved before she learned that loving poets is often a dangerous habit.
(POEM REMAINS EXACTLY AS WRITTEN)
...
(He stops.)
A long silence.
Rain against the window.
The apartment listening.
ARMAN
He wrote that.
And then they came for him.
Not immediately.
History is rarely efficient.
After the coup they arrested him for what they called leftist sympathies.
That is what frightened governments fear most.
Not revolution.
Not violence.
Not even conspiracy.
Thought.
A thought can survive a prison.
A poem can survive a government.
Governments know this.
That is why they panic.
(Pause.)
A poem begins as a possibility.
Before the final line is even written, somebody demands a confession.
Before it can become literature, it becomes evidence.
They turn a poem into a crime before it is finished.
SANAZ
You are very sentimental for an informer.
The rain continues.
Arman does not deny it.
He turns his face toward the wall.
For the first time he seems tired beyond repair.
ARMAN
I gave them four names.
They gave me six months.
Ever since then I have been trying to determine whether the arithmetic makes me a coward or merely a man.
I have not discovered a meaningful distinction.
Scene 5 — The Final Morning
Dawn.
Grey light.
The colour of unfinished decisions.
From the street below comes the sound of footsteps.
Too controlled.
Too synchronized.
Too quiet.
Men attempting not to sound like men approaching an arrest.
Arman stands at the window.
Looks down.
Sees them.
For a moment he simply closes his eyes.
The future has arrived.
Exactly on schedule.
Sanaz stands in the kitchen doorway.
Watching him.
ARMAN
They are here.
SANAZ
I know.
(Pause.)
Who called them?
ARMAN
I did.
Five days ago.
Before I came here.
Before I knocked on the door.
Before you opened it.
(Pause.)
I led them here.
That was the assignment.
That was always the assignment.
SANAZ
And my father's address.
The telephone call.
ARMAN
Yes.
Silence.
The footsteps stop.
Below, a knock sounds at the building entrance.
Official.
Patient.
Terrible.
The kind of knock that already knows the answer.
SANAZ
Then go.
Tell them what you came to tell them.
Let us complete the arrangement.
ARMAN
(very softly)
Yes.
That is what should happen.
That is what the plan requires.
He puts on his coat.
Walks to the door.
Stops.
The apartment is silent.
He still does not look at her.
ARMAN
I spent four nights drinking tea with a person.
She turned her books inward because she wanted the right to choose what strangers knew about her.
She made tea at midnight without being asked.
She spoke about loneliness as though it were weather.
She called me sentimental as though it were both an insult and a kindness.
(Pause.)
That is not nothing.
I had forgotten that was not nothing.
He opens the door.
Leaves.
A long silence.
Then his voice from below.
Muffled.
Clear.
Final.
"There is nobody here."
A pause.
A gunshot.
Offstage.
Silence.
Longer silence.
Then longer still.
Sanaz remains motionless.
She does not cry.
She does not run to the window.
She does not move at all.
Finally she walks to the kitchen.
Pours a second cup of tea.
Places it carefully where he used to sit.
Steam rises.
The chair remains empty.
The apartment remembers.
Blackout.
Philosophical Theme
The machinery of betrayal is rarely destroyed.
More often it is interrupted.
A single decision.
A single refusal.
A single moment in which someone chooses to become larger than the role history assigned to him.
The tragedy is that such moments usually arrive after immense damage has already been done.
Arman does not become innocent.
He does not become heroic.
He does not erase what he has done.
He merely chooses, at the final possible moment, not to complete it.
And that choice costs him everything.
There are worse definitions of redemption.
ACT II — SCENARIO II
Sanaz Was the Hunter All Along
Staging Note
In this version of the story, the fugitive's name is Kourosh.
The production should encourage the audience to revise its interpretation of every preceding scene.
Nothing they witnessed was false.
Nothing was entirely true.
The challenge is not to transform Sanaz into a villain.
Villains are easy.
Certainty is easy.
The challenge is to make her increasingly difficult to judge.
Every gesture of kindness she offered in Act I must remain genuine.
Every expression of loneliness must remain genuine.
Every wound must remain genuine.
Only their meaning changes.
Or perhaps the audience's understanding changes.
The distinction matters.
Sanaz should never appear cold.
On the contrary, she should appear almost painfully self-controlled.
Like someone who once believed too much and has spent years constructing defenses against her own capacity for belief.
The audience must gradually realise that her warmth contains calculation, but also that her calculation contains warmth.
The tragedy of this scenario is not betrayal.
It is disillusionment.
The apartment should feel different here than it did in Scenario I.
There, it functioned as sanctuary.
Here, it functions as a courtroom.
Every object quietly contains evidence.
Every silence sounds like testimony.
Scene 1 — First Night (Revised)
The locks open.
Kourosh enters.
He is larger than memory suggested.
Broader.
More solid.
More earnest.
He carries rolled pamphlets beneath one arm, wrapped in newspaper.
The effect is unintentionally comic.
A man transporting revolutionary literature in precisely the manner a police officer would imagine revolutionaries transport literature.
He has not noticed this.
No one has told him.
Sanaz notices immediately.
Says nothing.
KOUROSH
I thought you had left the country.
When they did not find you at the old address—
SANAZ
They were not looking for me.
(Pause.)
I was merely inconvenient to acknowledge.
KOUROSH
Your father's network—
SANAZ
(a fraction too quickly)
My father has nothing to do with this apartment.
A brief silence.
Too brief for Kourosh.
Long enough for the audience.
SANAZ
Sit down.
You are standing in my doorway like a man trying to decide whether to trust a place.
The place is fine.
The question is whether you can afford to be here.
Kourosh sits.
Sanaz begins preparing tea.
She measures the leaves.
Then measures them again.
A tiny act of precision.
A tiny act of control.
Kourosh does not notice.
He begins speaking about the movement.
The arrests.
The couriers.
The reorganization.
The future.
Sanaz listens attentively.
Not because she is learning.
Because she already knows.
The difference is invisible.
Scene 2 — The Wrong Questions
Morning.
Kourosh emerges from sleep.
Sanaz sits at the table.
A notebook lies open before her.
At the sound of his footsteps she closes it.
Not guiltily.
Precisely.
As though completing a task.
KOUROSH
Who else knew where you were living before you moved?
SANAZ
Three people.
Why?
KOUROSH
I am trying to reconstruct how SAVAK found the courier line.
We lost three people in four days.
Someone talked.
SANAZ
How were they arrested?
Night arrests or street arrests?
Kourosh stops.
Looks at her.
Really looks at her.
The question is too professional.
Too specific.
Too informed.
KOUROSH
Night arrests.
How did you know to ask that?
SANAZ
My father was a military officer.
Night arrests mean addresses.
Street arrests mean surveillance.
Different methods.
Different failures.
(Pause.)
Tea?
He accepts the tea.
But he continues studying her.
The first crack has appeared.
Not in her story.
In his confidence.
Sanaz meets his gaze serenely.
Then begins discussing something entirely unrelated.
A novel.
A professor.
The weather.
Anything.
Kourosh allows himself to be distracted.
The audience should not.
Scene 3 — Her Confession, Which He Does Not Recognise
The third night.
The city outside glows with the exhausted light of people staying awake for reasons they cannot explain.
Kourosh is speaking passionately.
As always.
The future has arrived in the room.
It has taken Kourosh's voice.
KOUROSH
When this is over—
When it finally changes—
The women of this country will—
SANAZ
The women of this country will what?
A pause.
SANAZ
What will we become after the men finish deciding what we should become?
KOUROSH
That is not fair.
The movement—
SANAZ
The movement is a room full of men who disagree on everything except their certainty that women are allies rather than leaders.
My father spent twenty years in that room.
The Shah spent twenty years in a different room.
The furniture was different.
The conversation was not.
Both rooms smelled the same.
Both rooms decided the same thing about people like me.
That we should be grateful.
Silence.
SANAZ
I spent my childhood waiting for my father to come home.
He came home twice in ten years.
Each visit occurred between causes.
Each departure happened before the previous arrival had fully ended.
He called it sacrifice.
I called it preference.
We never agreed.
KOUROSH
And so you—
SANAZ
And so I made other arrangements.
Yes.
She says it calmly.
Without emphasis.
Without apology.
Without pride.
The audience hears a confession.
Kourosh hears only a sentence.
That difference will cost him.
Scene 4 — The Accusation
Fourth night.
Kourosh has discovered the document.
A partially completed SAVAK report.
Folded behind the inward-facing books.
Waiting.
Perhaps hidden.
Perhaps intended to be found.
He holds it in trembling hands.
KOUROSH
You sold your soul to the regime.
Sanaz does not flinch.
Does not defend herself immediately.
Does not become angry.
Instead she studies him with something almost resembling pity.
SANAZ
No.
I sold my faith in men.
There is a considerable difference.
I would appreciate it if you understood that before beginning a speech.
KOUROSH
What difference?
People were arrested because—
SANAZ
The Shah arrests people because he fears losing power.
Your comrades accuse one another because they fear losing purity.
SAVAK uses torture because it can.
The Fedayeen use denunciation because it is cheaper.
The methods differ.
The appetite does not.
A long silence.
SANAZ
I did not choose a side, Kourosh.
I stopped believing sides existed.
That is not the same thing.
Though I understand why it is disappointing.
KOUROSH
You informed on people.
SANAZ
Yes.
I informed on people who were already being hunted.
I gave SAVAK names they possessed already.
I withheld names they did not.
For two years I have performed a balancing act so precise that even I no longer know whether it is courage or cowardice.
Perhaps both.
Perhaps neither.
Scene 5 — The Envelope
KOUROSH
And me?
Did you give them my name?
Silence.
A long one.
The apartment seems to lean forward.
SANAZ
Four days ago.
Yes.
Kourosh stands.
For a moment he appears physically unable to breathe.
The pamphlets remain on the shelf.
Still wrapped in newspaper.
Still absurdly hopeful.
KOUROSH
Then I am already dead.
SANAZ
Not yet.
She walks to the bookshelf.
Removes an envelope.
Places it before him.
SANAZ
There is money.
Identification papers.
A contact in Tabriz.
A route through the mountains.
A tunnel into Turkey.
The instructions are encoded using Shahriar's examination cipher.
You always hated it.
Which is why you will remember it.
(Pause.)
I arranged everything three days ago.
KOUROSH
You reported me.
And then planned my escape.
SANAZ
You were already on the list.
When you knocked on my door they had your name from six different sources.
All I did was confirm what they already believed.
(Pause.)
You still believe in something.
Do you know how extraordinary that is?
How unbearable?
You speak about justice the way priests speak about heaven.
I cannot decide whether I admire it or mourn it.
KOUROSH
You envy me.
SANAZ
Desperately.
Because certainty is a luxury.
And I spent mine years ago.
The Departure
Kourosh takes the envelope.
Moves toward the door.
Pauses.
KOUROSH
When they come for you—
And they will—
What will you tell them?
Sanaz considers this carefully.
Almost cheerfully.
SANAZ
The truth.
I have been saving it for a special occasion.
Kourosh exits.
The door closes.
The apartment becomes silent.
Not empty.
Silent.
Sanaz pours the untouched glass of water.
The same glass from the first night.
The glass she never drank.
The glass that has been waiting.
She raises it.
Studies it.
Then drinks.
Outside, Tehran continues exactly as before.
Traffic.
Laughter.
Arguments.
Radios.
Ordinary sounds.
History never announces itself.
It arrives disguised as another evening.
The lights remain on.
Sanaz does not move toward the door.
She does not move away from it.
She simply remains.
Waiting.
As though the apartment itself has become visible through her.
Philosophical Theme
Cynicism is not the opposite of idealism.
It is idealism after repeated disappointment.
Idealism that has been betrayed often enough to become suspicious of its own hopes.
Beneath Sanaz's collaboration lies not indifference but longing.
Not moral emptiness but moral exhaustion.
She saves Kourosh not despite her cynicism but because of it.
Only someone who has stopped believing in causes altogether can see a person separately from the cause he represents.
The paradox is cruel.
The idealist fights for humanity.
The cynic saves a human being.
History contains room for both.
It is rarely kind to either.
Act II — Scenario III
The Revolution Never Happened
Staging Note
In this scenario the fugitive’s name is Daryush. The production must introduce temporal dislocation gradually, as nausea is introduced: first a slight wrongness, then a persistent sense that the room is not quite level, then something that can no longer be ignored.
Sound design is essential. Sounds from different decades of Iranian history should occasionally bleed through the apartment walls—softly at first, then with increasing insistence. The audience should not understand what they are hearing until the third or fourth intrusion.
Scene 1 — The Wrong Words
Daryush enters.
He seems familiar—perhaps too familiar. He speaks as a Marxist revolutionary, fluent in the correct vocabulary of the 1970s underground. Yet every so often, a word slips out of place. An anachronism. A phrase belonging to a future that has not yet been declared.
DARYUSH
The National Front and the Pan-Iranists will not—
(he catches himself)
SANAZ
The what?
DARYUSH
Too many factions. The National Front, the coalition, the right wing—none of them will honour any agreement once the Shah is—
SANAZ
Once the Shah is what?
A long silence. Daryush looks at her as if seeing her for the first time.
DARYUSH
Gone.
SANAZ
Gone?
DARYUSH
(quietly)
Yes.
A long beat.
From outside: a crowd sound—yet not anchored to any single moment in time. The chant shifts as it is spoken, as if history itself cannot decide what it is demanding.
Scene 2 — The Names He Should Not Know
Later.
They argue politics. Daryush mentions a name—an organiser—as though he already knows him. Sanaz stops.
SANAZ
How do you know Samadi? He was arrested last week. He is in Evin prison.
DARYUSH
(carefully)
Word travels.
SANAZ
Not that fast. Not about someone that obscure.
(pause)
You said his name like someone mourning him. Past tense. He was arrested six days ago.
DARYUSH
In prison, one mourns pre-emptively. You know that.
SANAZ
(quietly)
Daryush. What year do you think it is?
DARYUSH
(too long a pause)
What year do you think it is?
Outside: a sudden burst of sound—a woman singing a revolutionary hymn, but the accent belongs to no recognisable decade. Then silence.
Scene 3 — The Walls
Night.
Daryush sleeps.
Sanaz moves through the apartment slowly, as though she is encountering it for the first time.
She touches the walls.
She looks at the window.
She reaches the bookshelf—and stops.
The books are now face-out.
But they are not the books she remembers placing there.
Or perhaps they are the same books, only rearranged by a logic she does not recognise.
Some bear dates that do not belong to her time.
She takes one down.
Opens it.
Places it on the table without comment.
Then sits.
Still.
For a long time.
From outside, sound accumulates—not all at once, but in slow succession:
Traffic from another decade.
A Quranic recitation from a loudspeaker.
Gunfire.
A cassette-era pop song.
A crowd dismantling something unseen.
Silence after execution.
A child’s voice.
Silence again.
SANAZ
(to herself)
Which one of those is now?
Scene 4 — The Confession of Time
Near dawn.
Daryush wakes.
He finds Sanaz standing motionless, staring at the wall above the bookshelf.
Where there was only plaster, there are now photographs.
Dozens of them.
As if they had always been there.
As if the apartment had been concealing them.
SAVAK victims.
Revolutionary martyrs.
Royal portraits.
Propaganda posters.
Mosaddegh.
Khomeini.
Her father beside the Shah in uniform.
Her father in exile in Paris.
They overlap.
They contradict.
They coexist.
DARYUSH
(behind her)
You remember all of them.
SANAZ
I remember nothing. That is the problem. I have been living in this apartment and calling it a moment, refusing to understand that the moment has already finished.
(pause)
My father’s classmate became king. My father became an exile. The king was deposed. The exiles returned. The revolution devoured its own makers—and as for foreign invaders, they killed the defenders of this country in their own homes, along with their women and children. And I am still here—in this apartment, in 1975—waiting for something to begin that has already ended more than once.
DARYUSH
Who am I?
Sanaz studies him for a long time.
SANAZ
You are the revolution.
Or everything I ever believed about it.
You came to my door speaking the language of liberation—and you already knew what liberation would become. You carried all the answers, and every answer led to the same rooms with different names.
DARYUSH
Did we win?
SANAZ
Which side?
A long silence.
DARYUSH
Every side believed it was the last line of defence against barbarism.
SANAZ
Yes. And they were all correct. That is not a comfort.
Slowly, the light across the photographs changes.
he images begin to mirror each other.
A SAVAK officer and a Mojahed adopt the same posture.
A royal portrait is composed as though its gaze already belonged to a war martyr.
An arrest under the republic during wartime is treated as morally equivalent to an arrest under the monarchy—different decades, the same geometry of injustice.
She no longer looks at the wall.
SANAZ
My father told me: choose your side carefully, because you will become it.
I chose no side. I became the apartment instead.
A place where people arrive when they have nowhere left to go.
I thought that was wisdom.
Now I think it was only another way of disappearing.
Daryush does not respond.
When Sanaz turns, he is gone.
The couch is empty.
The apartment is unchanged—except:
The photographs remain.
The book spines now face outward.
Every title is visible.
Every book concerns the same country in different disguises of time.
None of them ends in a way anyone can live with.
She picks up the telephone.
Dials.
Waits.
SANAZ
Father.
(pause)
It’s late there, I know. I know.
I wanted to tell you—I have been reading your letters. All of them. From the beginning. I hadn’t before. I was too angry to get past the first paragraph.
(pause)
I still am. But I read them.
(pause)
Yes.
(pause)
Yes, all right. Goodnight.
She hangs up.
She turns off the lamp.
The photographs continue to glow faintly—without source, without explanation.
The apartment exists in several times at once.
The door has three locks.
Outside, the city continues its ordinary life: a city perpetually becoming something it has not yet decided whether to regret.
End of Scenario III
The Director does not return.
For the first time, he is unnecessary.
The apartment no longer requires explanation.
It has been speaking since before the curtain rose.
Philosophical Theme
Every political system constructs a hidden architecture of rooms—prisons, ministries, archives, apartments.
Those rooms outlast the systems that produced them.
Revolutions inherit them before they understand them.
Ideologies change.
Walls do not.
The tragedy is not betrayal.
The tragedy is continuity.
