TEHRAN – An adaptation of American playwright Robert Anderson’s 1968 play “I Never Sang for My Father” is on stage at Tehran's Shahrzad Theater Complex. 

Hamed Sehhat is the director and translator of the play. 

Shirin Farkhondeh-Nejad, Maryam Mash’hur, Mahshid Delavari, Mohammad Tayyeb-Taher and Arman Hosseini are the main members of the cast for the play, which will remain on stage until August 23.

The play tells the story of Gene, a widower, with an elderly mother whom he loves and an eighty-year-old father, whom he has never loved, hard as he tried. 

The father has been mayor of a small town in Westchester County, self-made and highly respected. Beneath these trappings, however, he is a mean, unloving and ungenerous man, who has driven his daughter away because of her marriage to a Jew and has alienated his son through his possessiveness, his selfishness and his endless reminiscences. 

Suddenly the mother dies, and Gene is faced with the responsibility of having the father on his hands just at a time when he wants to remarry and move to California. 

There are a series of dramatic confrontations when Alice, the sister, who has defied her father, pleads with Gene not to take on the burden of the old man and ruin his life; when the penurious father and son have to pick out a coffin for the mother; and the final episode in which Gene tries once again to rouse in himself affection for his father and succeeds, but only for a moment. 

For it is still not possible for him to "sing" for his father—to understand and be understood, to give the love he so wants to give, and to feel it all will be accepted, and appreciated, by his father, who cannot love.

ABU/