Berkeley Lecture Series Presents:
A Book Presentation by
Nasser Rahmaninejad, Director & Playwright
Topic:
A Man of the Theater:
Survival as an Artist in Iran
Place: Central Stage, 5221 Central Ave. Richmond, California 94804
Date: Sunday, February 23, 2020
Time: 4:00 pm
A Man of the Theater tells the personal story of a theater artist caught between the two great upheavals of Iranian history in the 20th century. One is the “White Revolution” of the 1960s, the incomplete and uneven modernization imposed from the top by the dictatorial regime of the Shah, coming in the wake of the overthrow of the popular Mosaddegh government with the help of the CIA. The other is the Iranian Revolution of 1979, a great uprising of Iranian society against the rule of the Shah in which Khomeini’s Islamist faction ends up taking power.
Nasser Rahmaninejad started his theater career in 1959 in Iran. In response to the authoritarian cultural policies and censorship of the Shah’s regime, he founded the independent MEHR theatre group in 1966, which later became the “Iran Theatre Association”. It continued its artistic work, until it was closed down by the Shah’s secret police in 1974. Sentenced to twelve years in prison and ultimately freed by the 1979 revolution, he resumed his theater work, but was soon forced into exile. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Lecture in Persian