The Alley of Love and Yellow Jasmines by Shohreh Aghdashloo

Author:Shohreh Aghdashloo
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

24

Elixir of Love?

My fourth year in school was the fastest one of all. I was swamped by books, newspapers, pens and pencils, highlighters, and working at Browns, and then suddenly it was graduation day. I felt like I had achieved something that once looked like a mirage. I invited a couple of friends and my cousins to my big day. I was graduating at the age of thirty-two but felt like a twenty-one-year-old in my black gown and tasseled hat.

Finally my name was called out. I got up to get my diploma and changed the direction of the tassel on my hat, from the left to the right. The direction of my life had changed as well.

Or so I thought.

I WAS NOW working full-time at Browns while I looked for a job in a media outlet. I was preparing for an interview at my favorite newspaper, The Guardian, when Parviz Kardan, a prominent Iranian actor and director who had also immigrated to London, called me and asked if I would like to play a lead in his play. That little actress in me woke up instantly and said, “Why not bring the script over and let me read it?”

I read the play and fell in love with it. It was a political play (ah, my major would get some good use) revolving around a calligrapher’s life in exile.

There were only two characters. Kardan was to portray the calligrapher while also directing the play, and I would portray the woman, whom the calligrapher meets at an Iranian gathering in London. But the calligrapher tells her that he has lost all his belongings. He explains that he has been condemned to death in postrevolutionary Iran for being the Shah’s personal calligrapher but managed to flee the country.

Living in exile, and witnessing all the injustices in Iran, makes him want to send a message to the international media for refusing to shed light on the truth. His plan is to jump off the woman’s balcony with an open letter to the media in his pocket, where it would be easily found after his death. Perhaps this act would draw attention from the British media. In the end the woman convinces him that going to the media directly would be the more powerful way to help his people.

I must confess that the play gave me a totally new perspective on politics and arts, and how interwoven they can be in real life. I had seen it in the movies but had never experienced it firsthand. The thought of the enormous possibilities, of portraying politics through the arts, was overwhelming and surely more challenging to me than becoming a politician, as I had planned. I could be far more beneficial to my people doing what I knew best—acting.

I decided to do the play. I was still at Browns and rehearsed in the evenings for a month and a half. I owed a sum of three thousand pounds to the university and had to pay it back in order to receive my B.

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