‘Andy Warhol in Iran’ needs some refining
Play with witty potential feels incomplete for now
The playwright Brent Askari lets his imagination loose on two of his fascinations — an American celebrity artist and the homeland of some of Askari’s ancestors— with “Andy Warhol in Iran,” an intermittently funny, two-character comedy that is having its world premiere this month at Barrington Stage Company.
Commissioned by Barrington Stage after Askari’s 2019 drama “American Underground” won the company’s Burman New Play Award and earned a production on BSC’S Mainstage, “Andy Warhol in Iran” depicts a fictional encounter during a real trip the artist took to Tehran.
After meeting the Shah of Iran and his third wife at a White House event in 1975, Warhol traveled to visit them the following year to take Polaroids on which to base a portrait of the princess similar to the extremely lucrative silkscreened images he’d done of celebrities and world leaders, including Marilyn
Monroe and Richard Nixon.
As the play opens, Warhol (played perfectly by Henry Stram) is in a hotel room reflecting on the trip thus far. Askari’s fiction takes over when a knock on the door turns out to be a young Iranian radical named Farhad (Nima Rakhshanifar). Brandishing a gun, Farhad tells Warhol he’s part of a group that wants to kidnap the artist and use the resulting scandal to force the shah, a repressive tyrant long propped up by U.S. meddling in Iran, to relinquish power.
While Askari and Stram create a convincing version of Warhol, from his speech and mannerisms to his ideas about fame and
art, Farhad is a more elusive character, especially in a play that sets out primarily to be funny. The internal logic of a comedy and its characters’ motivations need to be fully worked out, or the gears slip. Further, the tone needs to be absolutely clear, but “Andy Warhol in Iran” is an uncertain mix of light, dark, serious, silly and earnest.
Farhad seems menacing enough at first, and information
revealed later about his treatment by the regime is sufficiently awful to fire his zealotry, but Askari has written himself into a corner by creating an imaginary incident during an otherwise real trip. Farhad can’t genuinely hurt Warhol, much less actually kidnap him, and so the puzzle becomes how to resolve their standoff over 75 minutes in one room, and do so in a believable way that will allow Warhol to go off to the princess’ Polaroid shoot at the palace.
Rakhshanifar’s Farhad turns out to be a mostly hapless revolutionary; he has the urge but not the ruthlessness to try to topple a government, at least not yet. And that begs the question of how
he was the one chosen to go into the hotel and get Warhol, bringing him out when the others arrive with a getaway vehicle. Is the rest of the gang as ineffectual? Also, Farhad says Warhol’s commercial instinct to make himself rich in part by glamorizing despots with his portraits, as well as his fame and artifice, represent everything Farhad despises about America. If so, why does he soften his views of Warhol during an encounter that lasts barely more than an hour?
Such questions aren’t Rakhshanifar’s fault; as written, the character isn’t fully realized, and as a result his behavior strains credulity. Guest director Skip Greer, who is in his 27th season as artist in
residence at Geva Theatre Center in Rochester, crafts scenes well on an evocative hotel-room set by Brian Prather that accommodates effective projections by Yana Buryukova, used when the characters step out of the story’s timeline to talk to the audience.
The good news is that “Andy Warhol in Iran” needs tinkering by Askari, albeit some of it significant, though not the fullscale rewrite required to turn his earlier “American Underground” from screed to compelling drama. There’s potentially a funny story in a radical trying to kidnap a famous artist because he’s cozying up to a corrupt leader, but “Andy Warhol in Iran” isn’t finished yet.