Sunday, March 10, 2019

Woody Allen's Old Saybrook performed in Tehran



Iran isn't part of the international copyright convention and can do what they want, but I recall long, long ago reading a book by Woody Allen. It contained a short play he had written and it warned that you had to pay or have permission if you wanted to perform it, and they warned that this included people doing readings.

From the Tehran Times:
TEHRAN – A group of Iranian actors will perform a reading of Woody Allen’s “Old Saybrook” at Shahrzad Theater in Tehran on March 15.
Sajjad Qatei is the director of the reading performance in which he will also play a role, and Mahmud Rashidi is the producer of the production.

Bahman Vakhshur, Tima Pur-Rahmani, Ashkan Delavari, Hoda Fallah, Ramtin Meqdadi and Dorsa Hakimelahi are the other members of the cast.

The absurdist play is about Max, a writer who has left his play unfinished. Characters in the play finally get bored and a fight breaks out between the characters and the writer.

“In ‘Old Saybrook’, Mr. Allen indulges that side of himself that occasionally gets out of Manhattan like a Manhattanite with a summer rental,” the New York Times wrote in a review published in 2003. 
“Set in the opulent living room of a Connecticut beach house, the play begins with… the kind of literary, self-deprecating and neurotically screwy jokery that is pure Woody Allen. The clear reference is to Chekhov, whose bored, affluent characters, in Mr. Allen’s contemporary translation, are less pretentious than proudly shallow.”

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