Review: Thought-Provoking Humor Infuses the Huntington's NASSIM

At each performance of “Nassim” – a fresh, funny, and moving play being presented by the Huntington through October 27 at the Huntington Calderwood – a special guest takes the stage to find a script they haven’t yet seen, waiting in a sealed box.

At the play’s recent opening night in Boston, the guest performer was Jared Bowen, the four-time New England Emmy Award-winning executive arts editor at WGBH-TV and host of the “The Culture Show” on GBH radio, who admitted up front that he was “terrified” but proved game enough to field everything thrown his way with jaunty good humor.

After Bowen read his first line, a pair of hands appeared on the large screen upstage and began turning the pages of the script. These hands would turn out to belong to the playwright himself, Nassim Soleimanpour, initially unseen offstage. Thus began a dialogue through which Iranian-born Soleimanpour, and now a Berliner, explores his own personal experience of being an outsider in a foreign land but – with the device of an onstage guest with whom the audience identifies and who doesn’t know what’s about to happen – does so in a way that positions the audience as the outsider trying to figure out how things are going to work.

Alone on stage at first, navigating everything from lessons in Soleimanpour’s first language, Farsi, to questions about his favorite esoteric word and his favorite swear words, Bowen had the full and full-throated, support of his engaged and enthusiastic audience, setting the tone for a fun and intriguing evening.

The playwright eventually joins the guest onstage but remains silent throughout, even as we learn the clever – and healthy – method used by his mother to teach him to read his very first words in Farsi: when he couldn’t quite get it, his “māmān” would make him eat a tomato. With that, a plate of cherry tomatoes appeared and a call went out for volunteers to come up onstage to demonstrate the challenge of those boyhood lessons, and, in doing so, to deepen Soleimanpour’s relatability.

There are also poignant and thoughtful moments – the sharing of old photos of Soleimanpour’s family and his homeland, the gentle use of an illustrated children’s book – though occasionally the format can veer just a little too close to a highbrow game show/comedy club hybrid, such as when the playwright solicits gifts from the audience. Nevertheless, while on opening night the gifts proffered – including a Charlie Card, a business card, and a canned beverage – were meager, the laughs they elicited were big.

And so, without speaking a single word, and under the well-paced direction of Omar Elerian, Soleimanpour shared his story, with assist from Bowen, broadened our understanding both of what we share – humor, what makes a home – and of what it means not to be able to go home, welcomed people to relax and laugh with him, and made many new friends and fans along the way.

Upcoming special guests include retired Huntington managing director Michael Maso (10/15), Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart (10/16), former Boston Celtics play-by-play announcer Mike Gordon (10/17), former Boston City Councilor and now Northeastern University vice president John Tobin (10/18), Boston Lyric Opera artistic director Nina Yoshida Nelsen (10/19 matinee), Gamm Theatre artistic director and actor Tony Estrella (10/19 evening), film and stage actor Will Lyman (10/20), actor and director Marianna Bassham (10/21), Huntington trustee Veronica Anastasio Wiseman (10/23), comedian and circus performer Jack “Jacques Ze Whipper” Lepiarz (10/25), busy Boston and Broadway actor Nael Nacer (10/24), playwright John Kolvenbach (10/26), and Embrace Boston president and CEO Imari K. Paris Jeffries, PhD (10/27 matinee).

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