| Abstrakt: |
This article features the production of ta'ziyeh at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Similarities between traditions led to produce the ta'ziyeh play at the college. Ta'ziyeh plays share with their Christian counterparts similar symbolic forms, social arrangements, and ritual, processional, and dramatic structures: both are funereal cycles of plays that originated in religious processions, using collective grief as an annual occasion to celebrate a local town or village as well as to help a community bond through, among other ways, their common feasting. Because ta'ziyeh presume an initiated audience of believers, it is a difficult tradition to transplant to a new place. It was for this reason that at Trinity, director Mohammad Ghaffari presented a play in which the values could be universalized, rather than inescapably tied to Shiite ideology. |
