Account of extraordinary journey heads toward no clear destination

Ana Bayat might be one of the few people on Earth who woke up in Tehran on a fateful morning in 1989 to hear, whispered in her ear, that the Ayatollah Khomeini was “muerto.”

In a singular youth, Bayat hopscotched from Iran to Spain and back again, on either side of the 1979 Revolution, then back to the West, straddling a range of languages, cultures, governments and gender norms. In “Mimi’s Suitcase,” her autobiographical solo show, her avatar, Mimi, goes from worrying about a skatingrink date in Barcelona to frantically cover

ing her body with coats and scarves in sweltering heat to fend off attacks on her morality.

Her childhood is all stark divides. Bayat might dissolve her teenage pout with the aid of “Thriller,” then get dragged to a Komı te holding pen. She might get called a “whore” for acting in a play or loosing her hair from its scarf out the window of a car, then bound past a redlight district en route to an English class, with nary a care at all.

But if the show, whose threeday run opened Thursday, Jan. 23, at Nohspace, charts an unusual life, Bayat doesn’t often zero in on illuminating or surprising details or propel her tale toward a clear point or from a burning need to speak. While her subject matter is inherently interesting, what she makes of it isn’t. Though she has a couple of lovely lines about the subversion of letting some extra hair puff out from a headscarf, or about the rejuvenating ex

perience of at last feeling fresh air on a musty scalp, in her telling, life in the Islamic republic is about as restrictive as you’d expect. Parties get busted. Idle meatheads luxuriate in their newfound authority to terrorize women.

Bayat accounts for the new regime’s rise to power with a narrative you already know, whether from Nazi Germany or “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Oppressors work gradually, almost imperceptibly, chipping away at freedom with inconveniences and frustrations you can acclimate yourself to with a sigh, instead of seizing it all at once. She reconfirms stereotypes about the lethargy and officiousness of visagranting agencies; she paints a portrait of a 1980s teenager most of us would recognize, her ardor for Duran Duran and “Flashdance” grounding her sense of self.

And if Bayat’s journey is extraordinary, she stops her story at what feels like an arbitrary point. Mimi has made one part of her escape, but there’s still a long way before teaching at St. Mary’s College of California, where Bayat now lectures. She offers no reflections to make this point of her life become a natural stopping place, as if some discrete action has been completed. It feels more like the tale slips away or gets abandoned.

Under the direction of Elyse Singer, the show makes awkward use of projections. As Bayat drops into Spanish and Farsi, and even some French, supertitles appear only sometimes, so that whole exchanges occasionally pass by untranslated. Other animated images, by Tyler Gothier, unnecessarily underline what was already clear through suggestion. A girl sheds a tear in a sad moment. A plane takes off, when the roar of engines would have communicated that plot point just fine on its own.

If Bayat doesn’t always make sharp pivots from one speaker to another, her performance offers other compensatory virtues.

Embodying 27 characters, she mines her vocal range from ashtray depths to reedy heights. She’s astute in parsing the quirks of language — how wrong our vocal renderings are when we try to sing along to songs written in languages we don’t speak; how learning a new tongue isn’t just about grammar and vocabulary but also arpeggios of intonations.

In a moment when Mimi declares to Iran’s foremost Method acting teacher that she would “do anything to become a serious artist,” Bayat shows what it is to make a selfdiscovery. The confidence and selfpossession she finds have nothing to do with showing off for or proving herself to a teacher. She doesn’t have to speak loudly. It’s as if she’s awed by the beauty and simplicity of a truth that has only just become clear, in that instant. It’s such a lush, ripe moment of stage time that you start to wonder what other, richer solo show narratives might be hiding in this one.

Her avatar, Mimi, goes from worrying about a skatingrink date in Barcelona to frantically covering her body.

Bob Hsiang Photography Ana Bayat plays 27 characters in her solo show “Mimi’s Suitcase,” about living in Iran and Spain as a child.

Bob Hsiang Photography Ana Bayat describes her journey as a child between the cultures of Iran and Spain in English, Farsi, Spanish and some French in in her autobiographical solo show, “Mimi’s Suitcase.”