Featured Member — Mohammad Yaghoubi
By: Playwrights Guild Of Canada
Tags: Writing, Theatre, Art, Playwrights, Playwriting

Tell us a bit about yourself and how you got your start writing plays.

Born and raised in Iran, I grew up in a small town named Langroud, in the North of Iran. Our family’s financial situation wasn’t great, so I couldn’t buy books or magazines, so a friend of mine would lend me books and another friend of mine gave me the magazines that his parents bought that he never read. After I read those magazines and books, I would tell their stories to my friends. Time went by quickly. In high school, I wrote some short stories. My dream was to become a novelist back then.

When I finished high school, I went to Tehran (the capital city), far from my family, and started to study law, just so my family could get off my back. A few months after I started studying law, I noticed that there was a theatre group in the university, so I joined the group and didn’t tell anybody in my family about this, not even my brother who was studying law like me in the same faculty. In that group, I experienced acting for the first time in my life. At the same time, I started reading plays; let’s say I devoured them. Around six months later, I wrote my first play titled Return and gave it to my friends in that theatre group, and all of them liked it.

I decided to finish studying law so that my family was assured that I was “settled down” and would become a lawyer in the future. So four years studying law were enough time for me to learn theatre simultaneously. During this time, I was being trained in acting and directing classes instructed by two of the most influential theatre practitioners’ Hamid Samandarian’ and ‘Mahin Oskouei.’ During these four years, I changed my goal to be a novelist.

I wrote three plays during this time, and my friends were the only ones who read them. I was still encouraged to write more plays, but I was not confident enough to give them to directors and ask them to read. Everything I know today about writing drama stems from those acting and directing classes and reading numerous novels and plays while watching a lot of theatres and movies. I attended only acting and directing classes instead of playwriting classes because I didn’t have that much money to attend more classes. So I thought to myself: “Which classes should I attend to help with my writing with the money I have in my pocket?” I thought: “Well, I can learn playwriting from reading plays and books on playwriting, but I can’t learn acting from just reading books. I must act.” Attending acting classes taught me how to write for an actor. I never attended acting classes to become an actor. Though I wanted to be able to direct my own work, so directing was in my backpack- and I always tell my students in my writing classes to get trained as an actor and, secondly, take directing lessons. I know that directing your own work isn’t really a thing in North America. In North America, the writer and the director are different people. It’s quite common to see the playwright acting in their own play, which I find quite interesting, but in Iran, which is pretty much influenced by European theatre, such a thing is not common. In Iran and Europe, writers direct their own work, whether in theatre or cinema. The main reason I believe a writer must direct their own work is so that they don’t have to run after producers and directors to take a look at their play to see if they want to put it on stage or not. I believe playwrights shouldn’t wait to be discovered; they’d better stage their play and turn their dream into reality.

In the meantime, I experienced directing a play, The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, as a final project for the directing class. It was a wonderful experience because I learned how to work with actors. However, I had a problem after a private showing of it. As the director, I told my actors that they could hug each other (the scene where Tom comes home crying and Laura hugs him) and that they can smoke. In Iran, a man and a woman are not allowed to touch each other if they are not married, and even they are married, touching each other on stage is not allowed and also, no smoking is allowed in the months Ramadan. After all, it was a private showing, so I thought breaking the rules wouldn’t be an issue. However, there were auditions in the same theatre for a TV show, so a bunch of hardcore conservatives saw us and wrote about our play in the newspapers. The police came to our apartment to arrest me when I was in my friend’s house. Then they raided our house many time early in the mornings in hoping to find me. I knew that they didn’t have a formal order by a judge. So I stayed at my friends’ houses for two months waiting to be summoned legally and officially.

It’s a long story, and I wanted to say that this happening shaped my thought about theatre as an artistic way of action for freedom of speech. Two years later, I staged a play by Marsha Norman, Night Mother; faced again with many problems caused by the censorship office, and it is another long story. In the meantime, I wrote my play Winter of 88, which made me well-known when it went on stage a year after I wrote it. It was the first time I was confident to introduce myself as a playwright and director in a theatre festival. The play won writing and directing awards and two actors in my project won acting awards. This was around February of 1998. I was 29 back then. After that, I wrote another play, Dance of Torn Papers, which also won writing and directing and acting awards, and so on and so forth.