“For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor,” Haruki Murakami writes in his 2008 memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. “Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself.”
In writer-director Amir Reza Koohestani’s Blind Runner—now at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse produced by the off- and off-off-Broadway festival Under the Radar, the Iran-based Mehr Theatre Group, the 23-year-old NYC-based Waterwell, and the nonprofit Nimruz—running is those things, and much more: For a political prisoner (Ainaz Azarhoush), it’s a way to cope: “If I manage once a week to run 1132 times in our corridor, I’ll have completed a marathon,” she tells herself while running back and forth. (The “one thing” she misses “from out there,” she confesses, is the marathon: “Just being able to run again for 5 hours and 23 minutes. Running a long time, with no obstacle, with no wall at the end, with no turning back.”) For her husband (Mohammad Reza Hosseinzadeh), it’s a campaign for his wife’s release—inspired, as Koohestani explains in a program note, by the real-life story of imprisoned Iranian journalist Niloofar Hamedi, whose husband ran outside the prison where she was held. It’s also a chance to do some much-needed reflection (“There are two kinds of runners: those who run to clear their heads and those who run to think”). For Parissa (also played by Azarhoush), the title character, it’s a way to communicate. “Running was the only language that helped me connect to the exterior world,” she explains.
Running is also what brings the man and Parissa together—both literally and figuratively. In order to run a race, she needs a guide, a sighted runner whose hand will be tethered to hers. The wife (neither she nor her husband are identified by name) asks him to do this for Parissa: train her, travel with her, and compete with her. Does she realize the intensity of the connection he’ll be forging with this other woman? He likens it to “dancing a waltz,” but what he describes is much more intimate: “We step together, we run together, we turn together, we speed up together, we slow down together. The sounds of our steps merge together. We breathe in and breathe out together.”
Meanwhile, the husband and wife’s visiting-room conversations are becoming increasingly strained and distant; as every word is monitored, they’ve resorted to talking about insect behavior. They pick fights with each other. Her unhappiness irritates him. (Reminder: She’s in prison.) Unsurprisingly, he extends his time with Parissa. But now they’re tackling a race, and a test, of a different kind: running from Paris to London through the almost marathon–length (38 kilometers long) Channel Tunnel in 5 hours and 35 minutes, before the first train of the day speeds through, in order to protest the U.K.’s pending illegal migration legislation.
Just an hour long, Blind Runner, performed in Persian with English supertitles, blends speech and video, conversation and monologue with hazy but undeniably powerful results. And if you’re among those who know the simultaneous thrill and agony of crossing a marathon finish line, you’re likely to find the piece even more affecting.
Blind Runner opened Jan. 8, 2025, at St. Ann’s Warehouse runs through Jan. 24. Tickets and information: stannswarehouse.org
