**2. Words, Presence, and Soleimanpour's Theatrical Style**

Theatrical words can transcend historical boundedness and political boundaries.<sup>7</sup> Soleimanpour plays with language as a recurring theme in order to transfigure the relations of history and relationships across space and time. The play speaks from pasts, presents, and futures as an autonomous text. Its script renders the actor into a prophet of a non-existent past, and its plot meditates on the very problem of con-scripting an actor to follow the play down this rabbit hole. To perform with a script is, for Soleimanpour, to be obedient to that script's mission. The actor issues the commands of the playwright: "I actually made someone make you do something. [ . . . ] What are your limits of OBEDIENCE?" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 25). Theatre, therefore, demonstrates an analogous obedience to the one expected in response to the call of God. Obedience to God differs from obedience to a

<sup>5</sup> Certain theatrical styles, such as Bertolt Brecht's Epic Theater, intentionally give away the plot so as to encourage critical and distanced reflection on its political and ethical meanings.

<sup>6</sup> The first words of the printed script are "Instructions to the Producer/Presenter". Some pages of the print version, such as the one referenced here, are not numbered. Soleimanpour includes words in all capitals as a way to indicate something important for the actor to emphasize. All of the capitalization, boldface, and underlining in my quotations from Soleimanpour's script match the original.

<sup>7</sup> Soleimanpour is not alone amongst twenty-first-century playwrights who use theatre to cross religious, colonial, and militarized boundaries between the middle east and the north Atlantic, but Soleimanpour's experimental *form* sets his work apart. For example, Tony Kushner's *Homebody*/*Kabul* (Kushner 2004) approaches quite similar ideas about border-transgressing poetics thematically. Similarly, too, the multiple published versions of Kushner's play carry their own sense of an "unfinished" project. Kushner's *Homebody*/*Kabul*, however, deploys many of the expected conventions of a Broadway or West End production (e.g., memorization, naturalistic costuming and acting, scenes, a curtain call) missing from *White Rabbit Red Rabbit*.

playwright's text (rarely is God so straightforward), yet a text speaks action into being without its own voice.

Obedience to the text requires the actor's free choice to be obedient. To borrow Paul Ricoeur's phrase, the script is a "mute text" until the actor communicates on its behalf.<sup>8</sup> "This communication needs an INTERMEDIATE . . . the person who is called THE ACTOR" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 24). Is the "I" spoken by a character co-identical with the ego of the actor or the playwright? Or are we already playing roles dictated to us by innumerable cultural scripts? Soleimanpour displays such roles in the playful animal pageants and rabbit parables of the script (Soleimanpour 2017, pp. 16–17, 38ff). Clear distinctions between what marks obedience to a "felt presence" in religious experience (a "call") or obedience to unspoken social rules can be difficult to draw (Dox 2016).<sup>9</sup> *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* posits a playwright responsible for the text now printed on the physical script. The playwright's body remains distinct and distant from the historical event of performance, but he is nonetheless given a *present* voice by the actor. Audiences hear Soleimanpour's "I" in the actor's voice. Accounts of easy co-identification between actor and writer further rupture in Soleimanpour's later work, *Nassim*, a heartfelt piece about language and home, where Soleimanpour plays *himself* alongside another unknowing and unknown actor.

I want to linger for a moment with the comparison between *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* and *Nassim* to delineate some of Soleimanpour's theatrical techniques and style. Both plays are exercises in what Aida Rocci calls Soleimanpour's "manila envelope theatre" (Rocci 2017). Any given performance features an actor who does not know the play's script in advance. That is, both pieces feature a "COLD READING" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 3) from printed scripts by actors with the help some of our era's ubiquitous telecommunications technology and some plot-consequential props. *Nassim* even includes live projections and photography as a part of the fun. As a genre, Soleimanpour's "manila envelope" dramas foreground their own materiality. Though the plot is metatheatrical and seems to be mostly an actor talking about actors talking, a Soleimanpour script *cannot* be dematerialized into memory or smoothed into the veneer of spontaneity in rehearsals.<sup>10</sup> Performances will be rife with mistakes and improvisations as easily understood to be innovations as they might be considered "glitches" in the theatrical ritual (Grimes 2014, p. 73).<sup>11</sup> Both *Nassim* and *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* invite the audience to participate, both on stage and off. Both *Nassim* and *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* collapse distance and estrangement by means of a shared and textually mediated experience. Both *Nassim* and *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* prompt us to consider Soleimanpour's biography as revelatory or, perhaps, at least interesting enough to merit a night's entertainment.

The figure of the playwright is present for both plays, but in very different modes. The instructions to the producer of *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* requests (quite politely) that "it might be nice" if an "empty

<sup>8</sup> "The text is mute. An asymmetric relation obtains between text and reader, in which only one of the partners speaks for the two. The text is like a musical score and the reader like the orchestra conductor who obeys the instructions of the notation" (Ricoeur 1976, p. 75). Here, Ricoeur is not being esoteric. Texts are mute because they lack the mouths to speak on their own behalf. Soleimanpour's theatrical script operates like Ricoeur's reference to a musical score: in order to speak the text/script/score *must be played*.

<sup>9</sup> Donalee Dox's *Reckoning with the Spirit in the Paradigm of Performance* opens new ways to consider the spiritual knowledge imparted by "what cannot be seen in vernacular spiritual practices but is (for practitioners) nonetheless present" (Dox 2016, p. 148). Empiricist methodologies that require the confirmation of presence only through *material* and *measurable* proof create difficulties for performance studies interpretations. Dox calls performance the "permeable boundary between people's sense of an inner, spiritual life and the bodies acting in the materiality of culture" (Dox 2016, p. 60). For Dox, the materialist norms of the "performance paradigm" dismiss or explain away spiritual knowledges prior to serious investigation on practitioner's terms.

<sup>10</sup> Soleimanpour's experimental approach—"for ME, this is not so much a PLAY, as an EXPERIMENT" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 3)—exemplifies Larry D. Bouchard's "three overlapping sorts of metatheatre" (Bouchard 2020, p. 4). Both Soleimanpour's style and the *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* script foreground the theatricality of each performance (MT-1); the titular rabbit parable with its audience participants and animal pantomimes constitute a show within a show (MT-2); and the play's metaphors about obedience, suicide, and life (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 46ff) present the entire event as MT-3.

<sup>11</sup> For Grimes, "ritual glitches" are noticeable and unintended disruptions to ritual action, like a "badly timed flyover of military helicopters" that can stop a public reading (Grimes 2014, p. 110). A ritual glitch calls attention to ritual as human activity capable of "failure" and open to criticism.

seat in the front row" be reserved for the playwright.<sup>12</sup> The script calls repeated attention to the mobile "self" of the narrating actor and the script's writer. Do actors play Soleimanpour or themselves? It is not an Iranian dissident in 2010 who commands the scene but printed papers that construct a world and invite action. "Sometimes I get scared writing this play. I feel I'm designing a BIG GUN which will shoot somebody one day. Maybe even myself" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 35). These pages and the risks inherent in their interpretation must be given over to someone else to read. Words and stories connect across real time and space. *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* instructs its audience members to send Soleimanpour an e-mail during the course of the play. In the print version, "nassim.sn@gmail.com" still appears prominently in and around the text. *Nassim*, by contrast, calls for Soleimanpour himself to be there, a character in his autobiographical play. Both pieces therefore confront and build theatrical identities through materiality, confirming how human characters and non-human props "play" on a shared continuum in performance. *Nassim* even concludes with a totem of its performance history: a book filled with instant-print photographs taken at every performance. (Archaeologists who uncover this artifact can locate the performance I attended in Dublin by looking for an image with an airline blindfold, my "gift" to Nassim during the play.)<sup>13</sup> History and meaning are co-constructed between audience and actor. Where *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* concludes in silence and e-mail, *Nassim* concludes with a phone call in Farsi. In Soleimanpour's theatrical drama, communication becomes embodied and technologically mediated. Words, even if misunderstood, connect people through the things and experiences we share.

#### **3. Porous Boundaries of Stage Space and Showtime**

Soleimanpour's words (mediated through bodily movement, breath, speech, and material technologies) create the conditions of theatrical presence both spatially and temporally. The actor in Soleimanpour's play holds the pages of the script as a prop that is part of the show. The script has its own agency as a player in the drama. Scripts can be metaphors as well as physical objects. Soleimanpour's drama revels in this ambiguity. By asking audiences to give unplanned gifts (*Nassim*) or to use their smartphone to communicate *in medias spectaculum* (*White Rabbit Red Rabbit*), Soleimanpour points beyond the symbolic and literal perimeters of the stage space—so objects in the pocket of an audience member might become props, too. The script's words trigger present embodied actions that erase the boundary between active players and passive watchers. Soleimanpour's plays are full of invitations for the audience to become what Augusto Boal calls "spect-actors", simultaneous observers and participants in the theatrical event (Boal 1985).<sup>14</sup> During *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* every member of the audience assigns themselves a number and speaks it aloud; some numbers are called to play along with the script (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 2). The script therefore assigns roles to the members of the audience (one, two, three, and so on); sometimes and for some people, the script transforms those roles into missions. Number 5 *always* receives the crucial instructions to set the plot in motion: "I want you to choose a glass of water, take the vial and stir its contents into the chosen glass with the spoon. Then put the cap back on the vial. Go ahead. AND BE CAREFUL. DON'T SPILL ANYTHING" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 5). These rules are written into the script as part of its dialogue. At other points, the script invites unspecified volunteers to take on a scripted role.<sup>15</sup> During the play's off-Broadway run in 2016, Nathan Lane joked about his distaste for audience participation, for him a theatrical taboo that "falls somewhere between incest and folk dancing" (Gioia 2016). Certainly, all conscious audiences

<sup>12</sup> Soleimanpour has since witnessed and participated in performances of *White Rabbit Red Rabbit*. For a description, see (Youngs 2013).

<sup>13</sup> I saw *Nassim* at the Project Arts Center as a part of the Dublin Theatre Festival on 6 October 2018.

<sup>14</sup> Von Balthasar's theory of theatre makes the same point, though without invoking Boal's sense of political action or his technical term: in *Theo-Drama* "the boundary between the actor or agent and the 'auditorium' is removed, and man is a spectator only insofar as he is a player" (Balthasar 1988, p. 18).

<sup>15</sup> An unspecified volunteer becomes especially important at the play's conclusion by playing the role of the "White Rabbit" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 57ff).

participate in a theatrical performance; Soleimanpour even warns how "it is YOU, spectators, who ARE there. YOU are there. YOU are participating" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 56).<sup>16</sup> Soleimanpour's script commands a violation of the spatial boundary between actor and audience, the 'sacred' distance that sets apart stage and seats in the house. The absent Soleimanpour, through the voice of the actor, calls these number-characters up to the stage to play along. The opening counting ritual concludes by musing on the question "Did you count me?" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 3). Theatrical presence and participation need not be reduced to spatial proximity.

But Soliemanpour's drama also blurs the *temporal* boundaries between actor, audience, and playwright in its conscious construction and subversion of what I call "Showtime". Theatre always calls time to mind.<sup>17</sup> It takes time to perform a story.<sup>18</sup> Rebecca Schneider explains, "Time is the stuffing of the stage—it's what actors, directors, and designers manipulate together" (Schneider 2014, p. 7). Showtime is that time set apart from other times by a theatrical event and during which a theatrical event occurs.<sup>19</sup> Showtime identifies the temporality of performance, the temporal dimension of the stage's space *shared* by performers and audience. One does not require a proscenium arch to make a stage, but the activity of performance, what Peter Brook calls the "act of theatre", brings a stage into being for some witness (Brook [1968 ] 2019). This is the difference between the scaffold that makes a platform in the front of any potentially empty auditorium and the performance that renders that platform into a stage for the show. In Shakespeare's famous speech, Jacques announces "All the world's a stage" thanks to its mere "players" with "entrances and exits" (Shakespeare 2006a, II.7). The boundaries of the world-stage, then, are not galactic wings or an oceanic apron but human parcels of passing time. Showtime is that which a showstopper disrupts but does not negate. Here, I distinguish "Showtime" from the description of a given performance's "run time": the show's duration as a length measurable by a clock. Speeches after a curtain call do not add to a play's run time, but they are an aspect of *this* performance's Showtime. Breaks for applause or laughter or lament constitute meaningful moments of a theatrical event. A subway car is not an architectural stage, but, in New York City, the (often unwelcome) announcement of "Showtime!" could transform mass transit into an acrobatic arena in the time between stops. Yet a play can twist time into knots, imagining morning sun after sunset or plunging a midday performance into midnight darkness. Hamlet reminds us how theatrical "time is out of joint" (Shakespeare 2006b, I.5). Showtime holds the strangely mutable and subjective experience of time's passing during performances. The same duration of time might carry a thick slowness for a dull play or a surprising lightness and speed during an exciting one. Showtime, therefore, refers at once to the "time of the play" (as in the drama's temporal settings and its performance histories) as well as the "play's time" (as in the theatrical event that occurs *in* time and *with* time). Just as a performance needs its stage space, a performance happens during Showtime.

Stages are places set apart within a wider geography, so too Showtime sits apart from other times *within* wider histories.<sup>20</sup> Every performance of *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* remains singular thanks

<sup>16</sup> Near the end of the play, Soleimanpour includes "PASSIVE" witnessing as a mode of participation for "my spectators", those numbered and present (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 56ff).

<sup>17</sup> Many scholars have taken up the question of theatrical temporality. Time, after all, is a fundamental analytic category for drama and appears in Aristotle's *Poetics* as one of its "three unities of time, place and action" (cf. Wiles 2014, p. 55). Aristotlean time is not the only option. Maurya Wickstrom's *Firey Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History* reviews how theatre's time can interrupt passive, "processional histories". Wickstrom tracks plays and performances like Soleimanpour's where conventional distinctions between past and present shift into the potentially emancipatory relationship between what has already been and what Walter Benjamin calls "a now" (Wickstrom 2018).

<sup>18</sup> Theatre foregrounds the connection between *Times and Narrative* enumerated across (Ricoeur 1984). There can be no hard distinctions between reading theatrical drama and performing it. In many ways, "reading time" and time spent recalling a production expand to complicate the boundaries of Showtime. Encounters with theatrical drama—reading and seeing and remembering—always occur during some passage of time.

<sup>19</sup> Anne Ubersfeld's semiotic approach to theatre and time begins its analysis by identifying how "*theatrical time*" can be understood as the relationship between the "two distinct temporalities" of theatrical phenomena: "the time it takes for a performance to be completed . . . and the time pertaining to the represented action" (Ubersfeld 1999, p. 126, emphasis original).

<sup>20</sup> Performance, like play and ritual, sets itself apart in place and time from other phenomena. My analysis of performance incorporates the philosophy of play at its root. Consider how English language words for theatre show this essential link

to the prohibition on foreknowledge and its always different actor, but the script also calls out the singularity of its temporal moment in history.<sup>21</sup> At one point, the actor demands that Number 6 announce the day of the week, the date, and the year of *this* performance (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 19). Soleimanpour uses this information to differentiate, but not sever, the time of the playwright from Showtime. Immediately after Number 6 provides the date, the actor says "The day I'm writing THIS part of the play is 25 April 2010. So you see how even MY TIME differs from yours" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 20). The time of composition has been caught up into Showtime. Usually, Showtime would be a time of multiple citations. Showtime bridges the "gap" between the "liveness" of theatre and a given play's rehearsal and performance histories (Schneider 2014, pp. 68–69). But because every performance of *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* calls for a unique cast, the actor possesses no rehearsal record to recall and re-present. Indeed, this extemporaneous performance appears *like* a rehearsal with communal improvisation in the presence of the playwright's script. Showtime marks the time of communal endeavor. Soleimanpour foregrounds the "now" of Showtime in self-conscious awareness of the ongoing present moment. Showtime does not resolve Zeno's paradox, but it demarcates the finite experiences of beginning and ending.<sup>22</sup>

*White Rabbit Red Rabbit* makes an interesting test case for Showtime precisely because it is *not* a piece of durational theatre that indexes the time of its own performance or responds to a specific moment of time.<sup>23</sup> Audiences might perceive some beginning and perceive some end as the fluid limits of Showtime. In this play, temporal limits echo in the spatial limits of the stage or the limited pages of the printed script. The audience sees a sign of Showtime's end as it approaches: the script's pages do not go on forever. Conventional theatrical drama marks the threshold of Showtime with the rituals of a curtain call: bows and applause. But, like so many theatrical experiments that unfold into the night—consider Richard Schechner and the Performance Group's *Dionysus in 69* and its parade into the streets—*White Rabbit Red Rabbit* frustrates a clear moment of transition from Showtime to after in its conclusion (Performance Group 1970).
