A Moment of Silence

Shiva wakes up to find she has been asleep for three years. In that time, the world around her has changed drastically. Her friends and family seem different. Strangers act oddly. It's Iran in 1980 and she has just slept through the Islamic Revolution. For the next ten years, Shiva continues to fall asleep for years at a time. Each time she wakes up there's a new change she has to try to grasp: the war with Iraq, a series of murders of dissident artists as well as transformations in her own family. Meanwhile, the playwright creating Shiva's story begins to receive phone calls threatening her life. A Moment of Silence, by Mohammad Yaghoubi-one of the most beloved Iranian plays of the last 30 years-is a surreal, poetic, and surprisingly comic meditation on Iran's turbulent history.