Moshiri, a young theatre director, was especially affected. Moshiri and her team of actors were about to premier a play when government officials approached Moshiri, requiring her to sign an agreement that she wouldn’t produce anything that went contrary to Islamic values and beliefs. The young Moshiri disagreed.
She went underground, but her director and actors were arrested. Then, upon her parents’ insistence, she took her two-year-old son and set out with her husband on a journey that would take her first to Afghanistan, then India and, ultimately, the United States.
Her new opera, Bricklayer, opened at the Houston Grand Opera March 15. It is a 37-minute, English-language semi-autobiographical account of her years as a young immigrant struggling to adjust in a new land.
Bita, the young immigrant of the opera, reunites with her parents a few years later, but finds out that they are not the same people she left behind. They are broken, crestfallen versions of their former selves. Her father, Mr. Parvin, has aged beyond his years and has a mental disability after extensive torture by the regime. Their only son executed by a firing squad as he stood in front of a brick wall.
Although in America, Mr. Parvin is still traumatized by his experiences in post-revolutionary Iran:
I was there and I witnessed
In the dark hallways
Boys and girls in chains
Heavy booted guards
Kicking their bellies hard
Blood and vomit
Screams and sobs …
Bricklayer, then, is a vignette of the life of an Iranian family, traumatized and uprooted, and still haunted by the experiences of their past. Bricklayer is also a character in the opera—an enigmatic phantom, perhaps a figment of Mr. Parvin’s imagination—who pledges passionately that he won’t build another wall before which people can be shot to death.
Bricklayer is an adaptation of a short story of the same name by Moshiri, who also wrote its libretto. The play was commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera’s community outreach arm, HGOco, which was seeking to diversify the organization’s operatic offerings and reflect the many colors of America.
After opening March 15, Bricklayer has been performed during Now Ruz celebrations and at events organized by Iranian-American community organizations.
But telling the story of an Iranian family in the Western medium of the opera was not an easy task; then there is adapting a short story into a poetic libretto, a medium of work that was new to Moshiri.
“The composer would tell me, ‘This sentence is too long, we have to divide it,’” Moshiri told the Houston Chronicle.
Her first draft was about 50 pages long; her final, only 25. But she was able to incorporate a few Persian folk tunes into the text, and urged the composer—New York-based Gregory Spears—to use the ney, a Persian flute.
“By the end, I felt like Farnoosh and I were old friends,” says Spears, 34. “It’s a very intimate process living with someone’s words for so long.”
Moshiri, now 60, has been living in the United States since 1983. She teaches English at the University of Houston-Downtown. She is now married to an American, and her father is long deceased, but she has stubbornly clung to her Iranian roots. Her speech still carries thick cadences of Farsi, perhaps a testament that, despite a regime’s efforts, a writer’s voice always remains her own.
Reviews of the opera in The Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post and the Houston CulturalMap website were generally poitive. But Joel Luks, writing for CukturalMap, said the opera was far too short to survive on the stage and urged that it be “upsized.”
