“Andy Warhol in Iran” with Rob Lindley as Andy Warhol/Photo: Michael Brosilow
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Andy Warhol was a disruptor. His art sparked delight, outrage, debate and contemplation in his time and in the decades since. Though he’s most known for eye-catching Pop Art pieces like “Campbell’s Soup Cans” and “Marilyn Monroe,” his photographs are what I admire. Warhol had an incredible ability to really see someone. He could capture it for a brief instant and even translate that work into text through his Interview magazine. As Brent Askari’s fictionalized Warhol explains, his superpower is really seeing things for what they are.
Except for politics. In “Andy Warhol in Iran,” as well as in life, Warhol considered himself politically neutral. But no one can escape politics—especially the world’s artists. When art inescapably reflects life, it gives away even our most obscured blindspots.
Askari places Warhol just ahead of the revolution in Iran in the 1970s to get Polaroids of the Shah’s wife for a portrait commission. Warhol takes the gig, bemoans the heat during his visit, and finds himself in a dangerous situation when a revolutionary named Farhad shows up in his hotel room. Warhol is a target for doing work for the dictator. Suddenly his apolitical leanings don’t seem to hold up to the work he’s been taking on.
“Andy Warhol in Iran” with Rob Lindley and Hamid Dehghani/Photo: Michael Brosilow
Rob Lindley as Warhol is an unwavering glimpse of a man oscillating around a jaded moral compass. Lindley captures the socially awkward nature of Warhol. He wasn’t a flamboyant attention-seeker; Warhol was the introverted artist who exhibited his talents best by staying on the sidelines. In contrast, as Farhad, Hamid Dehghani holds his passions close to his chest. Dehghani shows that even the strongest among us have fears about what lies ahead and his seething pain as someone watching his beloved homeland be tarnished is palpable from every corner of the theater.
Askari’s play, which premiered in June 2022, can be hard to watch. Though the events occur in the 1970s, we see similar violence and oppression in today’s Iran. As Iranians, largely led by women and young people, continue fighting for their rights, Warhol’s apolitical lifestyle becomes more difficult to swallow. With Mike Tutaj’s projections blurring the lines between the past revolution and the current one, we are reminded that there is more to be done. If we as a society have learned anything in the whirlwind last few years, it’s that no one can be politically neutral. After all, if you choose silence in the face of oppression, you are siding with the oppressor.
Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard, Skokie, northlight.org, $35-$79. Now through February 26.
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