"No Summer"; Untold Stories of Forbidden Love

"No Summer" is the latest play by Amir Reza Koohestani, a guest at the 72nd Avignon Festival, which is considered one of the largest performing arts festivals in the world alongside Edinburgh. Koohestani previously participated in this festival two years ago with the play "Hearing," and this time marks Iran's second presence in the main section of the Avignon Festival. According to Koohestani, "No Summer" is the third part of his trilogy following "Salgashtgi" and "Hearing"; a trilogy with structural and thematic similarities that primarily focuses on creating social situations that are not meant to directly engage the audience with the characters and subject matter; rather, Koohestani attempts to confront them with a certain distance. This "distance," while having become a characteristic of Koohestani's work, also creates problems in this new piece. The actors' performance style and the delivery of dialogues—clearly and deliberately distancing themselves from exaggerated theatrical acting—could have been a point of strength for the performance, but the coldness of actions and reactions seems so pronounced that the audience cannot engage with the scene and believe in the characters. This particularly happens in the first half-hour of the performance, increasing the audience's distance from the events moment by moment, and following the numerous dialogues makes it difficult to keep track of the play. The type of theater Koohestani aims to achieve (using distancing, video, and minimalism) could have been heavily reliant on image and silence, but strangely, in this play, he resorts more to dialogue than in his previous works. The courtyard of an elementary school is the center of events that unfold with three characters over nine months (from the beginning of the school year to the end of June); one is the school principal (Lili Rashidi), another is her husband and the children's art teacher (Saeed Changizi), and a woman is the mother of one of the children (Mona Ahmadi). The play begins with the school graffiti; graffiti that has remained since the war and the children's art teacher is supposed to bring a different atmosphere to the schoolyard with new images. Addressing this social change becomes the main issue of the play: paintings that come over the graffiti but the shadow of those writings (of which we only see a few words on the video screen) remains and continues to be read; or a rainbow painting and an image of a happy imaginary family (including the painter's husband, the child's mother, and Tiba, their child) that appears on this wall but soon fades. In fact, the play is about frustrated loves: the art teacher clearly has fundamental disagreements with his wife that lead them to live separately. At the same time, this man has a strange dialogue with Tiba's mother in the schoolyard. The text does not express any signs of love between them, and we only understand that Tiba's mother has had dialogues with this man who is painting in the schoolyard every day. However, the shadow of this forbidden love appears in another forbidden love: Tiba's (the child of that woman) love for this art teacher. In a metaphorical language, Tiba is merged with her mother, and this is emphasized at the end when the mother plays Tiba's role on stage but we hear the child's voice instead. In the final video, when we see Tiba's face for the first time, the imaginary image of that happy family with a Ferris wheel that had been forced to close now opens—perhaps temporarily—giving a taste of joy for a moment in their video dream. However, resorting to symbols and metaphors complicates the work's problem. On one hand, this type of symbolism fundamentally contradicts the minimal form and atmosphere of the piece—rendering any reference to the extratextual meaningless—and on the other hand, it leaves the writer caught in the dilemma of "saying or not saying" what has occupied his mind.