A Moment of Silence is an award-winning play by celebrated Iranian playwright and director Mohammad Yaghoubi. Surreal, poetic, and unexpectedly humorous, the play offers a deeply human meditation on Iran’s turbulent modern history. Presented with significant support from the new Princeton Humanities Initiative.
Shiva, the protagonist, wakes up to find she has been asleep for three years—only to realize she has missed the Islamic Revolution. Over the next decade, she continues to slip in and out of sleep, awakening each time to a drastically altered world: the war with Iraq, the murders of dissident artists, and upheavals within her own family. Layered with absurdity and poignancy, the play also follows the increasingly perilous journey of the playwright shaping Shiva’s story, as anonymous threats begin to blur the boundary between art and reality.
A Moment of Silence, translated into English by Yaghoubi and Torange Yeghiazarian, is highly acclaimed in Iran and internationally, having also been translated into French, Czech, Turkish and Kurdish. It has been hailed as the best play to emerge from Iran since the 1979 Revolution and widely acclaimed for the playwright’s layered and imaginative approach to realism. The play has been recognized by the New Play Contest of the Toronto Fringe Festival, the Playwrights’ Society of Iran Award for Outstanding Play, the Iranian National Theatre Critics Society Award for Outstanding Direction, and the International Theatre Festival of Iran Award for Outstanding Direction.
Learn more:
https://arts.princeton.edu/events/a-moment-of-silence-by-mohammad-yaghoubi/2025-10-31/
Presented internationally and in other parts of the U.S., the Princeton production is the first in this region of the country.
Directed by Nikoo Mamdoohi, an Iranian theater director based in Washington, DC; with dramaturgy by Q-mars Haeri, postdoctoral research associate in Princeton’s Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies; and Iranian designers Omid Akbari (set) and Afsaneh Aayani (costumes).
Supported by Princeton’s Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship (ProCES).
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