Abdolhai Shammasi

A Contemporary Iranian Playwright, Director, Author and Theater and Drama Educator

Abdolhai Shammasi was born in 1954 in Shiraz. He wrote his first play when he was only 11 years old. Along with his insatiable thirst for knowing about drama and theater and reading intensively on art and especially literature and cinema, Abdolhai decided to do his BA in Drama at The College of Fine Arts in Tehran. Once he finished his BA and a period of depression he went through because of the suppression of art, particularly theater and drama in Iran, Hamid Samandarian, a great Iranian theater director and educator, invited him to teach playwriting and screenwriting in various Iranian colleges and universities such as Tehran Art University, The College of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran, Soore University, University of Isfahan, IAUCTB Faculty of Art and Architecture in Tehran, Free University of Arak, etc. He kicked off his artistic career before the Islamic Revolution with filmmaking and created a number of short films such as Flying in the Cage, Ball, etc. He also wrote a group of stories like The Green Frog, Six Tableau, The Song of the Nightingale, etc. He designed and wrote five groups of educational books on fiction and drama for the Ministry of Education. In addition to his other educational and artistic activities, Abdolhai has written several plays since the outset of his career as a playwright. The Tale of the Concrete City, The Comedy of the Lost, The Return of the Locomotive Driver, The Bitter Waiting, Prometheus the Sacred Devil, Done and Over, etc. are some his published and award-winning plays of which some have been translated into other languages such as English and French. The Tale of the Concrete City was translated into French in 1996 and was published by Antoine Vitez Publication.

The Tale of the Concrete City, directed
by Pavaneh Mojdeh, National Theater,
Chaharsoo Theater (1990)

In The Tale of the Concrete City (1990) we see the citizens of a city who have produced so much waste and therefore, have emptied the basement they live above in order to get rid of the accumulated waste, however, the ground has become so hollow and unstable that the residents of the city cannot walk around afraid of being immediately immerse into the litter. In the middle of such a mess, an architect and a surveyor strive to complete the plan of the city, although the surveyor's camera is broken and the architect is not able to find a good location to develop a green field since the hollowness of the space under the city. The sound of a bulldozer is heard from the beginning and in the middle of the play, the audience get to know that the huge machine works under the city the driver of which is blind. In the final scene, a young woman appears on the stage hoping to save her child's life.

Bahram Ebrahimi (left) &
Farhad Sharifi in The Tale
of the Concrete City (1990)

The Tale of the Concrete City can be classified as absurd drama. The anti-dramatic situations Shammasi builds up in this nightmarish play are mainly chaotic, timeless and odd in essence. There is no sign of character in the traditional sense in The Tale of the Concrete City, instead the playwright tends to depict grotesque personalities such as the architecture and the surveyor with capricious behaviors as well as unconventional humorous anti-character traits in his other dramatic works. Hopelessness, anxiety, evasiveness, purposelessness, misunderstanding, meaninglessness, disconnection, and peculiarity of these absurd, devaluated and maladroit personalities have given the playwright's dramatic world a sense of ridiculous irregularity and torturous unpredictability. The personalities seem unskilled and are not able to use the tools they have to save the city which is full of garbage. Like Shammasi's other works, The Tale of the Concrete City is based upon unusual dramatic patterns which make it anti-plot. In addition, as his other plays, this play is established on the basis of a sort of anti-linguistic obscurity and disorder which Shammasi has inherited from the global tradition of absurd drama and theater.

Mina Sarami (left) & Bahador Ebrahimi in
The Tale of the Concrete City (1990)

On the other hand, The Tale of the Concrete City appears to demonstrate a dystopian world in which human societies, due to their disintegration of norms and values, have degraded their environment to an extreme extent so that it sounds inhabitable and doomed to extinction through a type of apocalypse and nobody can do anything to tackle the grave issues even the so-called experts. This type of dystopian mindset about the contemporary human civilization can be tracked down in a number of other modern plays such as Far Away by Caryl Churchill where the society is going to collapse due to the lack of ethics and the reign of terror. Shammasi, like his predecessors such as Beckett and Ionesco, builds his terrifying apocalyptic as well as farcical world referring to the destructive role of technology and unethical use of it which has pushed us move towards a type of disastrous dystopia. It is important to mention that the personalities in The Tale of the Concrete City do not wait for any Godot to come and save them and this is what makes the Iranian playwright somehow different from the other absurd playwrights, although at the end of the play a young woman appears on the stage with her child asking desperately for help: "Is there anyone to help me?" which gives some sort of feminist flavor to the play. The Tale of the Concrete City is a dramatic work which gives us an image of a male-dominant society in which women are totally denied, ignored or suppressed as well as a society ruled by religious and ideological powers where new generations are oppressed for any sort of modern lifestyle or critical thinking. The bulldozer working endlessly under the ground is a symbol of unethical and pernicious powers threatening the very existence of humankind. It is, in fact, the creative metaphor of a voracious system which tends to insatiably devour every sign of morality and virtue by promoting consumerism and unaccountability. 

The Return of the Locomotive Driver 
directed by Tooraj Attari,
Molavi Theater (1990)

In The Return of the Locomotive Driver (1987), we see a locomotive driver who returns home in a freezing snowy night after he has got retired but his house has already been occupied by an odd old man who has changed the derelict building into a shithole full of garbage. The driver happens to meet one of his neighbors who is cleaning the snow off his front door while passing by to enter his house. He expects everybody to know him since a majority of the town population have already seen him as a train driver, but the neighbor does not know him at all. He informs the driver that his house has been locked for almost three decades and nobody lives in it. The driver insists that he came to see his family last week whereas the neighbor concludes that he is nothing but an ignorant lunatic who has lost his way looking for a place that does not exist. In the final part of the play, the locomotive driver faces the strange and shabby old occupant and makes his best attempts to get his home back.

The Return of the Locomotive
Driver, directed by Tooraj Attari,
Molavi Theater (1990)

The Return of the Locomotive Driver illustrates the phenomenon of social disconnection and alienation of a person who has been away from his hometown for a while and finds his city and his neighborhood in a dead-end alley quite unfamiliar when he gets back home. It is about the normal behaviors of a normal person which are considered aberrant in a society full of aberrations, the loneliness of a desperate man who has lost his vague identity due to the profound ignorance and peculiarity of his neighbors, those who deny his presence for unknown reasons and look at him as a moronic liar. Additionally, Shammasi demonstrates the real legitimate residents of a society occupied by outsiders and refers to Iran being occupied frequently by various invaders such as Greeks, Arabs, Mongols, and most recently,  the aggressive insiders called Ayatollahs. He wrote the play some years after the Islamic Revolution and tried to symbolize the hard times Iran went through after being captured by the Shiite clergymen.

Marzieh Sadrayi in The Bitter
Waiting directed by 
Abdaolhai Shammasi,
National Theater

The Bitter Waiting (1997) presents a studio which belongs a middle-aged painter located at the end of an old mall. He is painting a peculiar child, a masterpiece called Bitter Waiting which unveils the importance of the birth of a "Übermensch" (i.e. superhuman) at the beginning of the play. In the middle of the night when the doors of the mall are closed, three vagabonds, two men and a woman, break into the studio to apparently buy a painting. The men keep doing odd and dangerous things once they step into the atelier. They scare the painter out and eventually drive him mad. Finally, the men shit behind the paintings before they leave and promise to come back tomorrow night and get the painting they have decided to buy, although they return tomorrow night as a well-dressed gentleman and a serious conscientious cop who are trying to make fun of the painter and show that he is nothing but an insane stupid person who "is hallucinating", "doesn't feel good at all" and "needs intensive care". The painter goes through a nonstop self-defense process and these are some the last words he utters: "I shouldn’t let them to toy with my intelligence." The Bitter Waiting manifests the belligerent confrontation of politics and law with art and artists in societies like Iran where the regimes have never doubted to take advantage or humiliate the art creators and they works pugnaciously and nonstop to devaluate the priceless figments of the artist's mind.

Bijan Afshar (right, the painter), 
Mohammad-Reza Alimardani & Mansoor
Qani Jahed, in The Bitter Waiting,
Sayeh Theater (2001)

In Prometheus the Sacred Devil (2006) Themis, Prometheus's mother and the goddess of justice and law, suffers from a miserable life and has been dragged into prostitution by Zeus. At the beginning of the play, we see Prometheus sitting like Rodin's The Thinker when Themis brings him a sandwich. They have got used to eating poisonous food for a long time and they are getting weaker and unhealthier everyday. Prometheus's torture begins once Cratos (the divine personification of strength), Bia (the personification of force and anger) and Hephaestus (the celestial artificer) enter. Themis can do nothing but accommodate them. At the end of this scene, Hephaestus crucifies Prometheus and takes Themis to have fun. Io (the river god of Argos) enters now running away from Zeus carrying a backpack and unties Prometheus. They grow fond of each other while both, like all others, feel unstoppably endangered by the king of all gods. Themis comes back broken and harmed and comes across Io being concerned about whether love is going to be harmed now that justice and law have been totally devastated, however, she expresses her hope that a bright vivid day is on its way: "We've had a vicious start… We should start again."