Author Description

For over two decades, the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center has been publishing key dramatic works, classical and contemporary, from the Middle East, a major area of world drama hitherto almost entirely unrepresented in English translations. This unique anthology presents one of the most important but also much neglected dramatic traditions of that region, the Ta'ziyeh passion play of Iran, one of the world's most elaborate, wide-spread and long-lasting traditions of religious drama. It has been 150 years since the only significant English appearance of works from this tradition appeared, and those were based not upon actual preserved texts, as is the present collection, but from notes taken by Sir Lucien Pelly from oral performances. Like the great passion plays of Europe, with which the Ta'ziyeh has many similarities, this form grew out of the coming together of a wide range of earlier cultural activities, some in fact originating well before the Islamic era. Like cultures around the world, early Persia developed elaborate rituals of death and resurrection, connected to the changes of seasons and epic narrations of cultural heroes.