Presented by Lincoln Center Festival 2002 at Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center, NYC, July 17–21.
By attending only the last of the three Iranian Ta'ziyehs at the Lincoln Center Festival, I missed the sheep and camels. Instead, I got prancing horses and an actor crawling around the Damrosch Park tent in a lion suit. Performed in Persian without supertitles, "The Ta'ziyeh of Imam Hussein" was, to this Westerner, a 70-minute evening as grandiose and exotic as it was remote and robotic.
The Ta'ziyeh cycle tells the story of the 680 A.D. Battle of Kerbela, which resulted in the founding of the Shiite branch of Islam. Imam Hussein, the prophet Mohammed's grandson, follows the traditional heroic path to "martyrdom": call to arms, separation from family, divine intervention (here the Angel Gabriel in gold crown and purple robe), death, and apotheosis. A stringent program text synopsized incidents that climaxed with Imam Hussein's cantering around the ring on his white horse, his sword repetitively hitting enemy shields. In the end, he got knocked off, beheaded, and enshrouded by the howling lion.
For Iranians, the epic has great meaning. Ta'ziyeh is, according to the program, "the only indigenous form of music drama in the Islamic world." The work is filled with rituals: throwing hay over the head as a sign of mourning, patting chests and thumping feet in death spasms, men taking women's roles, villains speaking, heroes chanting—all accompanied by musicians on drums and brass.
The company was not up to its full complement (10 of the original members were denied visas), but the remainder, under Mohammad Ghaffari's direction, declaimed their lines with occasional bursts of seemingly spontaneous emotion. Yet this was as much a religious as a theatrical experience—a pageant, not a conventional narrative drama. And now, more than ever, we need such cultural events as bridges to mutual understanding in a maddened world.