Faezeh Jalali’s smile slices her small face in half and travels right up to her tired eyes. She has just finished a marathon weekend of all-day auditions for her new play in Mumbai, landing in Bengaluru that night and going straight to the Rangashankara auditorium (where her play 07/07/07 was to be staged the next day) setting up lights until 2 am, after which she acted in both 3.30 pm and 7.30 pm shows to substitute for a missing cast member.
As director of the play that won the Best Ensemble Cast at the META (Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards) this year, Faezeh is now seeing some returns for all the hard work put in by her fledgling theatre company FATS Thearts. They have been invited to perform at the New York Fringe festival in August 2016 and have had queries from Berlin theatres. The play is based on the writings of an Iranian woman, Reyhaneh Jabbari, who was hanged in October 2014 for stabbing a man who tried to rape her. The story is explored through mime, song, and stylized movements, with the script being the actual written words of the hanged woman. Key scenes are held in a freeze like a heartbreaking photograph, while the lighting and chanting make the story devastatingly real. Faezeh says she began her theatre company to explore this kind of freedom in storytelling and to be able to take the risk of experimenting with form and content.
The play opened in December 2015 at the NCPA festival to a resounding response and has since totalled 17 shows, touring in Pondicherry, Bangalore, Chennai and Delhi. Six months of devising and rehearsals and a whole year of planning have made Faezeh wear several hats as co-producer, publicist, director, and designer of the show. “We did not have a producer but the actors all related to the story and wanted to do it nevertheless; we agreed to share whatever money we made, and those actors who weren’t happy with this left but most stayed on.”
And yet despite her best efforts, they have run out of funds that they had collected and the prize money that came their way. When asked how she sees the economics of it she shrugs, “The problem is I don’t see the economics of it. We live in a world where unless you have a body of work people don’t put their money behind you… but I wanted to support risk-taking work and this is how it has panned out.” They now face the logistical conundrum of how to raise the money to travel to New York in August; time is running out for ticket bookings and visa applications.
With a large cast of 10 members, the overheads add up - food and travel bills have to be paid, apart from a nominal amount that each actor gets paid per show. In each city the actors have to find friends to stay with, because paying for accommodation is out of the question. An exception was the Adishakthi festival in Pondicherry where they were invited to perform. “We were hosted on the premises and it was so wonderful to have the stay and set up taken care of,” says Faezeh. “For once, we could just focus all on our energies on the play.”
She hopes to create a repertory of plays and to be able to retain actors on a regular payroll. “Actors have to keep doing work, right now it’s impossible to make a living solely out of theatre.” She freely admits that living with her parents in Mumbai excuses her from paying the rent and allows her to focus on theatre, a rare luxury in a system where the art form is one of the least lucrative. A few theatre-related jobs such as workshops for schools and corporate training work are her sources of income at the moment.
Publicity for plays is crucial- they require time and money and in the absence of both the best shows fail to bring in a full house, and this has been a challenging aspect of their tours. “Publicity is a huge job. I’m not that person. I would love to have people to do that for me so I’m free to create good work”, explains Faezeh.
“I guess the only way forward is to go out on a limb first, to present good work that then gets audiences and sponsors interested. Right now it is hard to convince sponsors to put up a show, but I’m hoping that as we keep performing, someone somewhere will pick it up.”
The play found her via a link sent online that outlined Reyhaneh’s story. “I felt like the hanged woman was talking to me, I felt responsible. This was within one year of her being executed… it was time for her voice to be heard.”
Reyhaneh’s words as found in her prison dairy drag the audience through the underbelly of the legal system and raise the deadly stench that emanates when manipulative male power is combined with misplaced religiosity. All the repeated appeals to the Supreme Court of Iran turn out to be in vain. Worldwide protest falls on deaf ears.
In the heartbreaking denouement the young woman writes to her mother just before she is taken away to be hanged, ‘My dear mother, my ideology has changed and you are not responsible for it. My words are unending and I gave it all to someone so that when I am executed without your presence and knowledge, it would be given to you. I left you much handwritten material as my heritage…’ She signs off ‘I wanted to embrace you until I die. I love you.’ The scene blacks out for a moment and then the audience is left with an empty silent stage onto which float many chadors, the long flowing gowns worn by Iranian women.
The chadors fall lifeless to the ground, they become shrouds, like the deathly silence of stifled stories that never find their way onto the page. Or the stage. The few who struggle to make these stories heard know that every voice counts, every scene adds up to fuel a collective conscience that could change things for the better. Meanwhile Faezeh dreams on about creating sustainable theatre. “I want to have a model that can make such storytelling possible. I am a theatre monk and I’m waiting for someone else to come and change that. I want theatre to thrive.”
