Cinderella (2013)

Cinderella (2013)

Public Performance at the Main Hall of City Theater

September–October 2013

This production entered rehearsals in the winter of 2012 and premiered after eight months of development. In Tehrani’s Cinderella, the Cinderella figure is not a fairy-tale heroine but the product of rumor. Within the idle gossip of a government office, a group of male employees begin referring to the general’s daughter as “Cinderella.” Gradually, through the power of collective imagination and repeated hearsay, she becomes Cinderella in the eyes of everyone around her. As this myth takes hold, she becomes increasingly unattainable, ultimately transforming into an object of permanent longing for the men who have invented her. For this production, Tehrani constructed 130 audience seats directly on the stage, creating a bidirectional performance space in which spectators faced one another across the playing area. Combined with the extraordinary public response, this innovative staging made Cinderella—relative to its limited run—the highest-attended production ever presented in the Main Hall of Tehran City Theater during the building’s forty-year history. What makes this achievement particularly remarkable is that Jalal Tehrani’s work has never sought broad commercial appeal. Within Iran’s theatre community, he has long been regarded as an experimental theatre maker whose writing, directing, and stage design consistently resist popular trends, fashionable aesthetics, and mainstream theatrical conventions. Rather than following prevailing currents, Tehrani has persistently pursued an independent artistic language —one that privileges formal exploration, conceptual rigor, and theatrical innovation over commercial accessibility.