INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
TEHRAN – Veteran Iranian actors Iraj Rad and Saeid Amirsoleimani will be performing American playwright William Hanley’s “Whisper Into
My Good Ear” in Tehran next week.Rad is also the director of the performance, which will be held at Shahrzad Theater.Rad and Jafar
Vali’s plans were to stage their play in 2016, but this plan was canceled due to Vali’s death, Amirsoleimani told the Persian service of
MNA on Wednesday.Last December, Rad and Amirsoleimani put on reading performances of the play for three nights at the Iranian Theater Forum
in memory of Vali.“The performances were warmly welcomed by theatergoers at that time, therefore we were convinced to bring it on stage
again,” Amirsoleimani said.The play had previously been performed by Vali and Jamshid Mashayekhi for broadcast from the Islamic Republic
of Iran Broadcasting.The play is about Max and Charlie, two old men who have rendezvoused on a winter beach for the purpose of committing a
joint suicide.American critic Howard Taubman has said, the play “is a study of two old pensioners who find surcease from their fleabag of
a hotel and their loneliness in meeting near the edge of a park lake.”“This time they have met to carry out an agreement to commit
Charlie is almost blind and full of truculence, the kind of man who resents the tree behind his back because it has been around 100 years
and will outlast him. “Max is gentle, introverted and, it develops, homosexual
Nothing happens between them, but the two talk-amiably, impatiently, bitterly, and reveal themselves and the sources of their
despair.” In the end, the suicide pact is abandoned, at least for the present, for both men become aware that it is often enough just to
be alive and to search each day for the values that even the most wretched can perceive.Glenn Jordan directed a TV adaptation of “Whisper
Into My Good Ear” for the New York Television Theatre in 1965.Photo: A poster designed by Bahman Vakhshour shows actors Saeid
Amirsoleimani and Iraj Rad rehearsing for “Whisper Into My Good Ear”.MMS/YAW
