Yasmina Reza

On September 30th I saw the preview of the production God of Carnage. It was written by Yasmina Reza and directed by Siena alumni, Shayne Peris. It was shown in the Beaudoin Theater in Foy Hall at Siena College. The play is about two married couples. The child of one of the couples hurt the child of the other one. They decide to meet to discuss what to do about the situation. What starts as a calm discussion, turns into a very heated debate. It turns into a very crazy evening for the two couples. I think that the purpose of the play is to show some great entertainment that includes a good amount of humor. The play has an interesting story, and it is funny to watch all of it unfold. As funny as the play was, there was a lot of serious situations…

God of Carnage is an undivided play. I disagree with Archer, in the case of this play, that lacking act divisions is a problem. I think this argument can change from play to play, but for God of Carnage specifically, there are several points I can think of to defend Reza's decision. Firstly, the play itself is too short to be divided into acts. Reza also neglects shorter divisions such as scenes and I think this is because the narrative of the flimsy guise of sophistication, the destruction of…

Argo (2012) is a movie directed and starring with Ben Affleck based on the history of the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1979. The crisis started when the Shah wanted to westernize Iran and it makes the Iranian people infuriate, when the majority people of Iran are Shia then the populace of Iran topples the Shah, deported cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini take over Iran and his supporters start to act violent against people who refuse to comply their cleric and people who suspected to be American…

Persepolis’s Place The Iranian Revolution took place in 1979, when Iran became a religious fundamentalist society and theocracy, changing the country as the Iranian people knew it. Clothing and fashion became centered around modesty as the new leaders believed that hair would stimulate and distract others. Children were enlisted—as young as age twelve—to go to war. The new theocratic government had a Supreme Leader who enacted legal changes, not for the will of the people, but for his own…

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi began his rule in 1941, following in his father’s footsteps. The first several years in power were very turbulent and unstable. He was rejected and removed from his Monarch position for a temporary period of time in 1953. He resumed power with the help of a US CIA and British backed coup. Many Iranians were not happy with the outside involvement by the United States and the hypocrisy of self-determination and democracy. Anti-western resentment was building. During this…

Another deciding factor in the fall of the Shah’s rule during the revolutionary period was influenced by the reliance of the Shah on American intelligence and intellectual support. The effective mismanagement and misreading of the situation by the Central Intelligence Agency resulted in misperceptions on the Shah’s grip on power, as well as the true magnitude of Khomeini’s power, intention and influence on his followers both in Iran and in exile. Ofira Seliktar sums up the underestimation of…

powerful religious disagreement and anger that arose in rebellion in the 1970’s, a revolution that created the religiously centered nation known as the Islamic Republic of Iran. The country of Iran grew into its potential for an Islamic takeover throughout most of the twentieth century, perhaps beginning with the rise of Reza Khan, the creator of the “Pahlavi monarchy” after his failure to “set up a republic,” when he overthrew the Qajars in 1921. The monarch kept his rule for about two…

class structures, and of its dominant ideology. Moreover, social revolutions are carried through, in part, by class-based upheavals from below” (Rentier State and Shi’a Islam 265). The Iranian Revolution is a social revolution because it involved lower-class citizens overthrowing Iran’s monarchy under the Shah’s rule. Prior, to the revolution Iran was under Reza Kahn rule. He was the colonel of an expert military compel who seized control in a coup d 'état and expanded his armed force to assuage…

have made Iran extremely wealthy, but only assisted Britain instead. However, without the help of foreign powers, the country would have never been able to gain access to the natural resource without Britain’s technology. Once Reza Khan rose to the throne as Shah, he was angered by the amount of resources and money that was being received back from the British. Thus, this caused Reza Shah to revoke the D’arcy Concession which only angered and shocked Britain. “They appealed to the League of…

and decisions that would exclude the input of other social interests such as those of the Shiite people, the Shi 'a clergy and the working class who saw modernization as an opposition to their way of life. This opposition to the Shah and his reforms came strongest from the Shi 'a clergy and in particular a priest name Ruhollah Khomeini who saw Mohammad Reza Shah as a pawn of the foreign powers. In response to a speech given by Khomeini, denouncing the Shah as a tyrant and his reforms as…