What follows grew out of an idea meant to build a bridge between philosophy and drama. The idea was simple: take statements from members of the philosophical group — archived on the “Chistiha” weblog — choose a few for reflection, work with their underlying concepts, lightly shape and edit them, and from that material create a dramatic idea. That idea could then open the door to new dialogue, new concepts, and further thought.
In the craft of playwriting, “ideation” and “plot development” usually follow a fairly clear path. We chose to stay one step earlier — at the moment of the first spark, what we call the “etude.” At this stage the writer’s hands are free. Any image, impression, or fleeting thought can be caught and written down. We did not hold back technical notes, staging ideas, dialogue, or scenic details for later drafts. Whatever rose in the moment was recorded as it came.
In our group meetings we decided that refined, polished plots were not necessary. What mattered was simply to capture, lightly edit, and record whatever appeared under the title “etude.”
We share these now with you. May these small exercises and etudes mark the beginning of a path across the bridge between philosophy and drama.
Etude No. 124
Stage play
Title: The End of the Ants
This play has two narrative levels.
The first level is the main one, which takes up almost a fifth of the entire play. And it is the story of Mohammad Hassan, a muezzin, and Dr. Elmi’s conversation. It takes place in one room.
The second level is four episodes of different adventures of four families from different generations and different countries. Apparently, they have nothing to do with each other. The only thing they have in common is that yellow ants play a role in them.
What they all have in common is that they go from action to inaction and passivity.
The conversation between Mohammad Hassan and the doctor is such that the doctor is constantly busy with his mobile phone and his head is down, and Mohammad Hassan mostly talks alone.
Level one of this play is inspired by “The P2 play directed by Morteza Mirmantezami in 2014” in Hafez Hall.
The character of Mohammad Hassan is such that today, he owns a large slaughterhouse and exports livestock abroad. He has been a part of the power lobby for years and has benefited from rents for himself and many others.
In his last act, he is told that the burnt seal must be finished; at the same time, he tries to maneuver on the news of Genk. He remembers how he was on the front line and how he could have saved the loader and bulldozer from turning left. However, at the beginning of this play, he turns his car left.
He turned left, his car caused the death of his pregnant wife. And now he is in prison talking to the doctor. However, whatever the doctor says, the words are turned into images in the video projection, and we, the audience, see it on the screen on the wall.
Everything is based on longing for the past. And what consequences the wrong choices have. And it is no longer possible to go back, change course, and correct mistakes. And in the end, we will find out that the reason why Mohammad Hassan is visiting Dr. Elmi today is that he is in an acute condition. And his schizophrenia and delusions have become severe. And the reason for his entire illness is that after he learned that he will be summoned and that his whole life will soon be ruined, he makes a sudden decision to end his life and that of his wife and causes her to leave her car on the road. And in that accident, his pregnant wife dies, but he himself wakes up from a coma after a few weeks. And his life has changed.
Mohammad Hassan is a burned-out pawn. Someone who apparently owned a slaughterhouse but was actually in various rents. And various transactions are made in his name, which is more anonymous, and he knows secrets that he should not know for a long time.
All these changes and his rise from poverty to great wealth during his life, and the fact that he has not had children for years and now that his wife is pregnant, he has made such a decision to end his life and finally let her die and continue his life, all of them have caused his mental breakdown. And now he is hospitalized in a special ward of a government mental hospital. And today, Mohammad Hassan is in two unbalanced states, sometimes very happy and sometimes very sad and depressed (manic depression), and he has decided to commit suicide. He no longer wants to continue this life. And Dr. Elmi must make a decision.
In his depressive states, he has a delusion that the entire room, from the floor to the walls and ceiling, is filled with yellow ants. And sometimes they climb up his body. And bite him. It is in this state that he says in a confessional way that he grew up in mud and dirt and anthills since childhood. And when he reached position and power, he did not understand the language of people. It is as if he did not understand what they were saying. What he means is that he was thrown from the bottom to the top in a class transformation without being properly prepared in terms of cultural customs and traditions. And he has seen the same in many others. All his colleagues seem like yellow ants that have suddenly emerged from the ground and are wandering here and there.
But we, the audience, will understand all of this gradually and at the end of the play. Why he has come to this day. And now he intends to end his life.
And the important thing is that Dr. Elmi is the only character in this play who spends his time with philosophy. And he wants to understand something about the existence of the world. And he has a distant and at the same time, close look at events, behaviors, and spirits. These days, he is busy reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. He wants to understand this difficult text. He looks at the Phenomenology book that he has scanned on his mobile phone every now and then and reads sentences from it. And in fact, he lives by believing in it. And of course, he understands to a great extent.
And as for the other four episodes:
1)
The Harris family in America, their history goes back to an Iranian couple. They immigrated to America in the mid-19th century. And they had many children and grandchildren. And they were engaged in farming in the state of Missouri.
Now Helen, who is sixty years old, has come to Iran alone. She has two daughters who have stayed in America. Helen came to Iran to research Iranian art. She wants to experience death in Iran. In her opinion, death is an experience; nothing more. And for Helen, who is a complete idealist, death is nothing but a part of life’s experiences.
But at this end of the road, something strange happens to her that she cannot digest. She finds herself deeply conflicted. She has tried for years to research Iranian art. And now she has come to take pictures of Iranian art and Iranian museums. And getting permission has been a difficult task for her because she is an American.
She secretly tries to take some photos at night. She went to Khayyam’s tomb and took photos at night. And there she slipped and hit her foot in a hole. And suddenly Namdar came to her aid. Namdar is twenty-eight years old. And he also used to work as a photographer. Which he has now stopped.
During this acquaintance, Namdar tries to help Helen; especially since Helen is very similar to Namdar’s mother. The mother who left when she was fourteen and went to Tehran. And she has not heard from her children again. During one of these photography experiences in a place that is plain and desert-like and has some ancient monuments, which Helen wanted to take photos of, she suddenly looks at the ground under her feet and it is full of yellow ants. And she screams. And Nader explains that as a result of the spraying, they have spread their colonies everywhere. These ants are called Pharaoh ants. Small yellow ants with stings.
Namdar forges permits for Helen so that she can go and take pictures of buildings and works of art. And this has Helen tormented by her conscience. In addition to all this, what is most painful for Helen is that every time she is with Namdar, she feels a feeling beyond any indescribable feeling. She suddenly discovers that she has fallen in love. And this is no small matter. Namdar is also younger than Helen’s little daughter, who is in America. One night, Helen decides to end her life. She feels that she has stumbled in achieving her goal, which was a lofty goal. And no matter how long she continues, there will be mistake after mistake.
And we witness Helen confronting herself as she chats with Namdar. But most of her conversations are with herself. We hear her monologue in the foreground. That she feels bad. The nausea is so intense that she hallucinates that maybe ants are walking in her intestines and stomach. Nausea that she did not experience when she was pregnant with both of her daughters.
We see all his chats on the screen in front of us, which is clear from the video projection. And in the intervals, their past events take place. Which are played back to the past.
The structure of this episode also has a linear process of the present. And reviewing past memories. A past that is regretful. And the mistakes that are repeated to this end point. Which is no longer a choice but the last way.
What is broadcast from the video projection on the screen is sometimes related to the famous mobile phone.
2)
One of the Qajar monarchists, Agha Mirza Agha, wants to spend all his business and capital on the work of the tarb and the work of the tarb. He loves the music of the pond. And the male and female singers who play instruments for him and sit around the pond and laugh and practice the melody of a market alley song. Their laughter goes up to the sky and there is no one who does not tell. Their men all have a yellow shawl around their waists. And their women also have red four-quarters with white flowers.
The show of instruments and singing and joy and happiness, however, suddenly takes on another form. The wife of Agha Mirza Agha, Sugoli, suffers from leprosy. She covers her face and sits and speaks with her hand on her side. Her voice can be heard at intervals. In the conversation between this woman and the other woman, we hear that the leprosy is due to phlegm in the blood. And she must have splashed the water that had been left in the sun on her face, and her transforming power can no longer properly transform food and enter the blood. And such old-fashioned words. Once she removes the veil, we see that half of her face is very beautiful and the other half is damaged.
But the unhappiness and jealousy of this Suguli is that she feels that Agha Mirza Agha has an eye for singing women. And this makes her go and sit next to the Sepahsalar’s wife. And tell her the secret of her heart. The Sepahsalar’s wife also informs her about the Reuter contract. And she tells her about the heavy sadness in her heart. And that the Sepahsalar doesn’t know what to do either. He is confused. The two women are opening up about their heartache. Right in the middle of the assembly, where there is dancing and popular instruments and songs, on this side are two women who are giving their opinions on important national issues and their important emotional and internal issues. What the Reuter contract will bring to this country. And the king himself doesn’t seem to know what he signed.
And at the end of this part, what disrupts the assembly are the yellow ants that, even though it is night, have come out of their nests and a few ants have bitten the feet of the women singers. And their screams and of course their silly laughter have gone into the air. And the assembly is no longer the assembly that Agha Mirza Agha wanted it to be. The assembly collapses and ends. And everyone leaves and this woman Sugli who has lost all her spirit remains. And she wants to do what she had intended to do. The same intention to commit suicide by taking opium that she had told both her sidekick and the Sepahsalar’s wife. And of course, we don’t know what will happen after Agha Mirza Agha sends her to the interior and closes the door of the courtyard himself.
The video projection in this episode also shows images of sentences from the text of the Reuters contract. And things like that in the conversation between these two women.
3)
Maqsoud Saeedpour is a supporter of the People’s Mojahedin Organization (MEK) who devoted his life to the ideals of this organization, but now he is confused and struggling with himself. Why did he devote his life to this organization in vain after Maryam Rajavi came? And he spent his entire life in European countries in poverty and misery. And now he has no capital. Living in a team house and having a communal life and those ideals of struggle have completely become absurd and excessive for him. And the only thing he has now is a bunch of shameful memories that he wants to put an end to. He had a friend from high school, Behrouz Ashtiani. The same time they went to prison together. And Behrouz was released after three years. He was released later than Maqsoud. And that’s why he didn’t hear from him anymore. Now that he has returned under a pseudonym, Iran has sought out Behrouz. He has found him. He has come to Kerman. Since the time Maqsoud escaped from the border. And he was about eighteen years old. And he has made his way to Europe. Since then, his heart has been pounding to see Behrouz and tell him about his fate. Now he is in Kerman next to Behrouz. In his construction workshop. He is describing the life of the immigrants to Behrouz, for this friend who is no longer the same Behrouz. His whole life has been work, work, work. That is, building huge complexes and investing in hectares of land using extraordinary rents. Behrouz listens to one sentence of Moghsud and talks ten sentences to his workers and engineers. Behrouz encourages him to return to Tehran and make money for himself there. And maybe he can have the company’s representative. While Behrouz is surprised by all this distance. This means that Behrouz does not understand someone who returned smuggled and under a pseudonym and cannot reveal his identity and returned because he did not want to continue betraying his country’s soil and returned to die here, how can Behrouz not understand that he has no money or support to start a representative office. This intellectual distance further annoys and annoys him. And his regret is a hundredfold.
On the other hand, the foreman and the foreman come and go and say that all the soil in this area has been taken by yellow ants. What should be done? If they spray, their colonies will move to another place and multiply. If they don’t, they won’t be able to work. The concrete parts are fine, but the garden and orchard parts and green spaces cannot be worked on. They have to act according to the plan. The town’s street construction is all about these gardens and green spaces.
The video projection shows images of buildings under construction and a workshop area full of elevated iron beams and round bars, concrete, and concreting and construction machines and devices, so that we feel like we are in such a space.
At the end of this episode, Behrooz has gone to look for the engineer and the foreman to calculate how many ants there are. And what is left is that he sees a yellow ant climbing up his leg in this room. He takes it in his hand and talks to it. And that’s it.
4)
A Chinese businessman who knows nothing about politics. And has spent his life immersed in business has now made a living in Iran. He is invited to a luxurious hotel. And they have a meeting. About a business contract. There he signs contracts and then finds out what details the contract contains that concern him. A huge loss has been incurred by his company due to insurance and other matters. And now he has come to an Iranian lawyer whose reputation as an expert is everywhere.
A lawyer who knows nothing except money.
(This lawyer’s character is somewhat similar to the character of Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s film “Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Fearing and Love the Bomb.”)
This lawyer will stop at nothing to ensure that all of his clients’ cases are a sure victory. Now, after much ups and downs, as if a secret is involved, he tells the Chinese businessman a secret. That he recently read in a magazine about how to reproduce yellow ants. He says things that the Chinese businessman does not understand. He keeps talking about formic acid, protein, and honey, which means that these are the things that yellow ants need.
And finally, this lawyer tells his mischievous plan. That if the Chinese businessman, whose native language is Chinese and whose appearance is not suspicious, joins him and carries out their plan, he will get a huge amount of money. And that they should go and smuggle ant colonies from Christmas Island – which is in the south of Java and near China – and bring them there and place them in several places around Tehran. Where there are gardens. And this business will be very profitable. Because the ants will gradually attack natural food sources and people will become disobedient and leave their lands. And that is how the end will come. The end of many things.
The video projection shows images of yellow ants on Christmas Island. And in various places.
Perhaps the end of the same history that Hegel mentioned. The self-consciousness of freedom. The inner dialectic. And that is it. That is all.
Author: B. Khosravani
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It is recalled that any copying and extraction of these ideas, from an ethical and legal perspective, is only possible by mentioning the address, and use for performance will only be possible if the author’s written consent is obtained.