Bijan Mofid (playwright/director) was one of a very few serious modern
Iranian artists whose writing has reached beyond the intelligentsia to
a broad general audience.
He was born in Tehran in 1935. After teaching for several years at the
University of Tehran, he founded the theater workshop, where many of
Iran's finest actors received their training. The workshop's major
production was Bijan's own "City Of Tales" (Shahr-e-Ghesseh), a
profound satire that weaves social comment through adaptations of
traditional music and folk tales. It toured for 3 years, was made into
an award-winning film and is recognized as a classic of Iranian
literature.
Bijan's work as playwright and director has had a continuous and
controversial presence in Iranian theater, both on the popular stage
and in experimental productions. Nine of his plays have been produced
and published and their songs recorded. He directed over fifty
productions for radio and television in addition to his stage work; his
rare appearances as an actor included the lead role in
Arby Ovanessian's acclaimed production
of Suddenly... at the 1992 Nancey International Theatre Festival.
The wide popular audiences drawn by Mofid's work earned him an
unprecedented degree of immunity from censorship. But his relationship
with the Shah's regime consisted of a balancing act between continuous
harassment from the secret police and the embarrassment of official
recognition and reinterpretation of his work. During and after the
revolution, political groups across the entire spectrum attempted to
claim his work as representative of their ideals, but he remained
independent and withdrew his plays from production when their integrity
was threatened. As the resistance to the Islamic regime grew,
recordings of songs from his plays were played on the rooftops of
Tehran, identifying Mofid with the opposition. As a result, he lived
underground for several months and eventually escaped. After coming to
the U.S. in 1982 until his untimely death in 1984, Bijan directed
several productions in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York as well
as the first production of his own work in translation; "Dragonfly". He
took these opportunities to rewrite some of his work that had suffered
most heavily from censorship in Iran. He is terribly missed by the
Iranian Arts community.
