“Why do I watch kids in Gaza buried under rubble, and I still go to work?” asks Banafsheh Hassani بنفشه حسنی. This isn’t a rhetorical question meant to provoke. It’s the question that the Montreal-based playwright can’t stop asking herself.
Hassani’s solo play Regarding Antigone, part of the 2025 Toronto Fringe Festival, insists on staying with this discomfort, asking us to confront the unbearable without turning away. “This whole play is this question – not a response to it,” she explains. “Why do I read about women beheaded and mutilated by their husbands and fathers back home, and I still sleep? How can I hear people pleading for their lives, for my help, and still go to French class?”
“I don’t know,” she admits. Enter Regarding Antigone: a 55-minute solo show directed by Art Babayants (with assistance from Sarah Larmony). It follows the intersecting voices of a mother, a daughter, a guilt-ridden activist, a wounded performer, and others caught in the contradictions of grief, displacement, and resistance. The show does not moralize or simplify. Instead, it questions what it means to live with awareness in a world where atrocities stack on top of each other — yet where most of us are still expected to show up for work.
The play began with a moment of frustration and urgency. “In 2022–23, I was in a playwriting unit at a local theatre company in Montreal. It was right when the Woman, Life, Freedom movement had started back home in Iran internationally, and locally to me in Montreal.” Hassani recalls a “desperate” urge to write something about what was happening: “I felt a social and political obligation, and an artistic responsibility. I was also drowning in contradictory emotions, being far from what was happening to my family, friends and people, and trying to be ‘political’ here in Canada”.
An early dramaturgical mismatch — working with someone who couldn’t distinguish the specific Iranian protests from general “Middle East conflict” — only deepened the disconnect. But in a concurrent university course where she was studying adaptations of Antigone, Hassani felt something click. “In my many attempts at making what I was feeling into a theatrical story… I came up with the story of a theatre troupe that is trying to put up an adaption of Antigone, and ends up having Antigone happen to them.”
Rather than retell Sophocles’ play, Hassani fractures and reworks its bones, borrowing its emotional scaffolding, rather than the exact plot or characters. Antigone “works everywhere and in every time because it talks about something that is not bound to time or place: resistance, oppression, rebellion, sacrifice and women-led movements. It’s all around us.” So what emerges onstage is not a Greek heroine, but a constellation of ordinary people – each pushed to a breaking point.
“As a writer, I had a big goal of not writing saints or martyrs,” Hassani explains – something which is difficult to do because “It’s something I gravitate towards, too. When it’s not impossible, it feels painful or disrespectful to write victims of violence as flawed.” Nonetheless, working with dramaturg esi callender, she created characters complete with shame, quirks, and meaningful contradictions. “They would call me out if [the characters] sounded too good! And I appreciated it so much… I filled a journal with my characters’ back stories and interrogated them in it about their contradictory feelings and shameful decisions.”
The performance ultimately demanded that Hassani separate writer from actor. She recalls fondly how director Art Babayants “didn’t want the playwright in the rehearsal room, and would snap me out of it with such delightful sarcasm every time my activist-writer side would emerge in rehearsal”. For Hassani the actor, “the switch between the characters wasn’t as challenging … as it was to embody and create each one in a unique way.” The writing, she explains, does the political and poetic heavy lifting: on stage, she does little more than bring forward people who “talk simply and live simply because they are random ordinary civilians.”
Of course, care for both writer and actor doesn’t end with the script. It’s embedded in every part of the process. “In the core team (also our traveling team) we’re all friends and previous collaborators,” Hassani explains. “It’s been very important to us to be able to communicate through everything: difficult days in rehearsal because everything is emotional, artistic disagreements, living through grant writing hell and marketing hell, taking on new roles, and learning new skills.”
And this ethic of care extends all the way to the audience. The team went so far as to work with a drama therapist-in-training and participate in workshops on ethical collaboration and active listening. And facilitated talkbacks give audiences the chance to decompress, share, and respond, if they choose to. “They work as both a regulatory space for the audience, a space for them to share their thoughts with each other and start conversations, and a chance for us to gather some feedback on our work.”
The production’s central tension—how we look at suffering without turning away—hits especially hard for those in the diaspora or in activist spaces, where grief often comes accompanied by guilt and burnout. “I hope Regarding Antigone becomes a catalyst for conversations.”
I hope that others in the diaspora feel seen. I hope that they don’t feel as alone and mute as I do,” Hassani offers. “Representation is rare, and it’s only when you receive it that you realize how isolating it is to walk around with no strings attaching you to the people around you.”
“Or maybe,” she pauses briefly, “I’m just projecting.”
But for organizers and activists in the audience, her response is much more certain: “I hope they walk away feeling inspired about the possibilities of art.”
Regarding Antigone runs at the Tarragon Theatre Solo Room from July 2 -13 as part of the 2025 Toronto Fringe Festival. The show is presented by The Sky is the Limit Theatre and Sort Of Productions. A care consultant will be on site. Tickets are available on fringetoronto.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
