On Aug. 9, The Hopkins Center for the Arts presented a work-in-progress reading of “The Brothers Play,” a play in development by Iranian-American writer Arya Shahi. The public reading, in which Shahi also acted as the main character, marked the culmination of his creative team’s weeklong Dartmouth residency.
The residency was part of the longtime partnership between the Hop and Department of Theater with the New York Theatre Workshop, a nonprofit theater based in New York City. Besides producing shows, NYTW operates a “developmental laboratory” that helps develop theater projects “at all phases of their lives,” according to its associate artistic director for workshops and development Rachel Silverman. Works previously developed in the residency include the Broadway musicals “Rent” and “Hadestown,” according to The Hop website.
NYTW has collaborated with Dartmouth to run its residency program on campus for the past 34 years. Silverman called the partnership “quite singular” in the theater world.
NYTW also engages with students from THEA 65: “Summer Theater Lab,” by inviting them to join rehearsals and feedback discussions. Lauren Mills ’27, a THEA 65 student who attended the reading, said her “favorite part” about the staged reading was “seeing the messy parts.”
Shahi said he knew of the Dartmouth residency “for many years,” calling it “a tentpole moment in the development of a piece.”
Shahi pitched “The Brothers Play” to NYTW in a “final draft” stage of the “last version”: a version performed in its first reading that took place last year at South Coast Repertory’s Pacific Playwrights Festival.
He said he appreciated how the Dartmouth residency offered the chance to work closely with the play’s director, Knud Adams, in the writing process, rather than the director being “attached later on.” Shahi said that the pair “kind of broke [the play] open” last week.
The play, Shahi’s first solo work, is about two Iranian brothers from Tucson, Arizona — one a poet and the other a venture capitalist — who reunite with each other and their immigrant parents after their lives take divergent trajectories. Besides romantic and fraternal love, Shahi noted how the play also grapples with loss: both in the sense of grief after losing a loved one and “loss of homeland when you immigrate.”
He explained how the play arose from a “tremendously introspective” period during the pandemic, when he was temporarily living at his parents’ house and contending with choices he had made for his life. Shahi said that the time when his brother — a real life venture capitalist — called him about his plan to buy a ranch inspired his idea for the play, by making him realize how they were “living different lives” at that moment.
From his experience with the post-reading feedback workshop with the THEA 65 students, Shahi noted that the play seemed to especially “resonate with people who have immigrant parents.”
Despite such thematic resonance, however, Shahi said he doesn’t “write with theme in mind.”
“Primarily, I’m a poet — so I write towards feeling, I think, and trying to understand something no one can explain,” he said.
Poetry plays a prominent role in the play, which Shahi described as highly intentional: even his “secret” motivation.
“I really just wanted to present poetry in contemporary theater, in the way that it may be like [a] soliloquy in Shakespeare’s time — or even like how songs operate in musical theater,” he said. “I think a lot of playwrights can write poetically, like writing using the tenets of poetry, but I've rarely seen, like, full-blown staged poems in the middle of a show — and I really wanted to write towards that.”
Indeed, reflecting the character’s obsession with an unconventional interpretation of the poem directly inspired by Shahi’s own experience, a moment in the staged reading consisted of a voiceover of Robert Frost reciting “The Road Not Taken.”
The staged reading also featured poems recited by the brothers’ Persian father, an aspect Shahi linked to childhood memories of his grandfather “sing[ing] Rumi poems after dinner.”
Shahi explained how his childhood interest in watching slam poetry “evoked some of the connection with Persian culture” he felt to be “missing” growing up as “an American kid.”
As for next steps for “The Brothers Play,” Shahi hopes to continue refining new scenes written during the residency and exploring the character of the poet’s wife, to whom he had made major changes — including changing her race from white to Persian.
In the long run, he expressed his desire for there to soon be “a full production of it somewhere in the world,” of which NYTW could “hopefully” be a part.
Shahi said that as he has continued to develop the play, it has transitioned from a wholly personal work to one that takes more creative liberties — constituting a work in which the main characters are “not really me and my brother,” but rather “a different version of us.”
“This has gone from feeling like I was journaling to feeling like I’m making a play for the American public,” he said.
Avery Lin ’27 is an arts editor and writer from New York City. She studies Comparative Literature, including French and Classical Greek, at Dartmouth and also writes for Spare Rib Magazine.
