Nastaran Ahmadi
Workspace: Current Session
Nastaran Ahmadi's plays include Layla and Majnun, Doctoring, Exile and Rocket Song. Nastaran is a member playwright at The Lark Play Development Center and a 2011-2012 Writing Fellow at The Playwrights Realm in NYC where her play, Exile (finalist, 2012 O'Neill Playwrights Conference), will receive a reading in their INK'D Festival of New Plays in May. She will attend The Orchard Project in June to develop her new play with original music, Rocket Song. Nastaran holds an MFA in Playwriting from Yale School of Drama where she received the ASCAP Cole Porter Prize in Playwriting.
Excerpt from Scene 1 of Exile
TAMRIN
I have a minute before I need to leave. So go on, try me.
Sam faces Tamrin.
SAMEERA
Okay, if war is necessary, which it is, then there’s no such thing as going too far. All the centuries of history and knowledge, the poetry, the art - that’s already been passed on. The good stuff has made its lineage.
TAMRIN
(Goading her to go on)
So
SAMEERA
So the rest of it? The actual -
TAMRIN
You’re rambling, you have to get to it in one sentence, right off the bat - draw her in.
SAMEERA
The actual place can go up in smoke and come down in rubble.
TAMRIN
To what end? Freedom?
SAMEERA
No, I don’t - I’m not talking about cursory illusions and ideology, I’m talking about building something.
TAMRIN
You just said you want to blow something up.
SAMEERA
In order to -
TAMRIN
You have to be clear about this -
SAMEERA
In order to make, to rebuild -
TAMRIN
Good.
SAMEERA
A new civilization in place of the old one.
TAMRIN
That’s better; there’s the action.
SAMEERA
Wipe out the entire world, and start from scratch.
TAMRIN
How?
SAMEERA
Nuclear bombs. Nuclear holocaust.
TAMRIN
Who starts it?
SAMEERA
Who cares?!
TAMRIN
Wrong. Everyone cares. You care.
SAMEERA
The question is who survives it.
TAMRIN
Keep going.
SAMEERA
Whose left to make something new happen? Is she a good person, bad person, radioactive person?
TAMRIN
So your heroine is radioactive?
SAMEERA
Yes.
TAMRIN
And she uses that radiation to help make a new world.
SAMEERA
That’s her thing.
TAMRIN
You have to get to that part sooner.
SAMEERA
A radioactive survivor of a nuclear holocaust
TAMRIN
is called upon to rebuild her world.
SAMEERA
One sentence.
TAMRIN
And where does this all take place? The Middle East?
SAMEERA
Iran.
TAMRIN
You want to nuke the place where you were born?
SAMEERA
I want to give it a chance to start over.
Pause.
TAMRIN
I’d play that game.
Excerpt from Scene 1 of Rocket Song: An Unfinished Play with Songs
… (They’re in a recording studio. Calliope has a water gun filled with acid pointed at Annette.)
CALLIOPE
I would never let anything break you.
ANNETTE
Acid won’t break me?
CALLIOPE
Just melt you a little.
ANNETTE
I’ll tell you what you get if you let me go. You never thought about that, did you? What you’d be rid of.
CALLIOPE
Hold on, let me write this down.
(Calliope doesn’t move.)
ANNETTE
My inappropriate behavior at parties. My insistence that we get out of bed right at daybreak.
CALLIOPE
The click of your lockjaw.
ANNETTE
My habitually promiscuous sexual appetite.
CALLIOPE
Why would I want to be rid of that?
ANNETTE
My short fuse
CALLIOPE
Your swagger.
ANNETTE
My ego.
CALLIOPE
Your ambition.
ANNETTE
What’s wrong with my ambition?
CALLIOPE
It smells funny. Like bath salts.
ANNETTE
Bath salts make your skin soft
CALLIOPE
But, your skin is meant to be made of barnacled rock!
ANNETTE
Says who?
CALLIOPE
Says your guts, which are coarse, which eject a rough textured mucus out through your epidermis to lay a sediment of angry scales there. Fuckin bath salts. Might as well wash away your insides.
ANNETTE
I don’t want my insides anymore! I want different ones.
CALLIOPE
No one gets to pick their insides. That shit is delivered via stork.
…
