Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour is daring. He likes to wade in the waters of the unknown, experimenting with live theater in a way that has everyone — from actors to audience, and even Soleimanpour himself — walking a tightrope without a net. Except, it turns out, there is a net: trust. Trust in one another, and trust in the fundamental power of art.
This truth is made manifest in “NASSIM,” Soleimanpour’s audacious theatrical experiment in which each night a different featured performer, referred to as the “Guest Performer,” takes to the stage while the script waits unseen in a sealed box. The Guest Performer then begins a cold read of the script in front of a live audience, experiencing the story unfurl off their own tongue.
Jared Bowen, host of GBH’s The Culture Show, took up the mantle of the show’s Guest Performer on its opening night at The Boston Center for the Arts’ Calderwood Pavilion earlier this month. It has its last Boston performance on Sunday, Oct. 27.
For someone who hasn’t had the chance to experience this play, Bowen had one piece of advice: “I would advise people to not read this article. If you did read it, try to wipe it from your memory and go in like I did — with no understanding and an open mind. The performance has the power to transform you.”
For those who want to read on: “NASSIM” is the second piece in a trilogy from Soleimanpour, following “White Rabbit Red Rabbit” that employs the same tool.
“It was written out of necessity,” Soleimanpour recounted on GBH’s The Culture Show, speaking with Bowen about their shared experience of the play.
When he wrote “White Rabbit Red Rabbit,” the playwright lived in his home country of Iran. After refusing compulsory military service, he wasn’t granted a passport and couldn’t leave the country. So he wrote a piece that could leave Iran without him.
“I was not OK with the structure of censorship in Iranian theater, and I wanted to tour my work, so I tried writing in English. My English is not great, but I invited great editors to help me, and with that decision, we shifted the paradigm,” Soleimanpour said. “That’s the origin of ‘White Rabbit Red Rabbit,’ which toured for a long time and is at the moment on the West End in London.”
The Guest Performer’s “cold read” of Soleimanpour’s script is central to the work. Bowen himself knew nothing about what he was doing. He’d even signed a contract promising to not do any research, which he said was “alien” to him.
“I didn’t know anything about the show — if I would be walking into a full cast on stage, or if I would be the only one on stage,” Bowen recalled. “And so when I was introduced and told to open a box, I was surprised to find the first page of the script. And that basically led me into a 75-minute performance that I was understanding second by second.”
The play has now been performed hundreds of times in different languages, on different continents, and always with a new Guest Performer, including actors Tony Shalhoub and Richard Kind.
As Soleimanpour tells it, putting those performers into a vulnerable and unpredictable situation inverts the typical dynamic of a play or movie.
“We’re always, like, creating this superhuman. There is a very handsome person, there is like a geek of a playwright. They write their lines and then we bring costume design, makeup, beautiful light, beautiful mist filters, you know, camera — and then ‘Go.’”
But that “superhuman” role creates a disconnect.
“When you look at them — this person looks like my uncle, but it’s ‘Uncle Plus,’” he said. “I am very much interested in using these pieces of this machine, but re-install it backwards: To get a human being on stage and basically bring them back to the society and let them be who they are.”
That process requires curiosity and honesty, along with trust. Bowen lived through putting that sort of blind trust in the creative process.
“At first leading up to it, I thought, ‘Well, I don’t know anything, so I can’t be afraid of what I don’t know.’ But 10 minutes before I walked out on stage, I was terrified. In fact, audience members with keen vision would have noticed that my knees were literally shaking on stage,” Bowen said.
“But within seconds of opening the box, I realized the audience and I were on this journey together. I felt their energy. I think they felt mine,” he said. “We were essentially a unit, and that immediately made me more comfortable, because we were all co-creating something joyous and lovely and beautiful.”
The play’s reliance on new Guest Performers for each performance is the bespoke nature of each discrete evening. It turns a stranger — a stranger to the playwright, at least — into a vessel for sharing someone else’s family and childhood.
“I was a participant in the exchange that Nassim wanted to have with his audience: understanding his language and culture and the poetry that guides him, and the meaning of love and family, especially through his mother,” Bowen said. “I essentially get to live it rather than be a passive audience member. And in many ways, that was transformative for me.”
“NASSIM” is at once touchingly autobiographical and powerfully universal. And, with the performer, playwright and audience speaking across English and Farsi, it’s a striking theatrical demonstration of how language can both divide and unite us.
Soleimanpour has lived through hundreds of nights of communicating across language barriers, which he described when Bowen asked him how much the show changes from night to night. That depends on the audience, not just the performer.
“It’s a party every night. Some of them are calm and it’s intimate ... and sometimes there’s a loud party with people overexcited and shouting,” the playwright laughed. “And you have to say, ‘Guys, chill! The neighbors!’”
At the core of “NASSIM,” Soleimanpour celebrates his family and the upbringing his parents gave him in Iran. Though the play hits on aching for family members who are far away and yearning for home, Soleimanpour says the performance itself has held an important role in his life as he’s toured “NASSIM.”
“It feels like my home,” he said. “Look, I mean, you see elements of my family, you see my dog’s photo — there’s Persian tea, you know. So I feel like, as someone who is living at the airports — has been, in the last couple of years — this is my new home.”
Presenting by The Huntington Theatre Company, “NASSIM” is on stage through Oct. 27 at the Calderwood Pavilion.
