By Brian Robin
Bringing Realism and Voice is Ana Bayat’s Language
Cultural Dramaturg and Dialect Coach Ana Bayat spent three weeks putting together the dramaturgy packet for Wish You Were Here by Pulitzer Prize-winning, Orange County native Sanaz Toossi. The packet contains research and facts that familiarize the creative team to the world surrounding the play’s story and setting.
It’s a process born out of love of what she does—and a fear that she’ll let the audience down.
“I always want to give credit to audiences. I feel like audiences today are so much smarter than you think,” Bayat said. “You never know the person sitting there may speak two or three languages and you might never realize that person knows the difference and may say, ‘Wait a minute. That song didn’t belong there in that time period.’ Or, ‘Bombs were falling later, not that year.’
“I feel like I’m an extra set of eyes and ears for authenticity.”
As the cultural dramaturg and dialect coach, Bayat is the human Google for all things factual on Wish You Were Here, which is set in Iran over a 13-year period (1978-91) that was transcendent in the country’s history. Have a question about the type or razor used in 1978 Iran? What style of make-up bags were prevalent at that time? Whether fake eyelash glue would be applied by wand or directly from a tube? What kind of broom would be used? Bayat is the creative team’s source.
Or her dramaturgy packet is their source. The 26-page packet contains information on everything from Iranian history, linguistics and religious groups to information on Iranian women before and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which unseated the Shah of Iran and installed an Islamic Republic. It also included a timeline of important events corresponding to the play’s timeline.
“You could Google something and say, ‘Here it is.’ But I don’t content myself with that,” she said. “I want to make sure it’s authentic. I want to make sure the sources are reliable. Some of this is because of lived experiences, but even with the question I had about the broom, I knew I had to do some digging.
“In my experience and research, a lot of things related to Iran are often tied to social class. For example, if you’re a wealthy person, your broom could have a long handle. Or you’d have a vacuum cleaner. In villages, the chances are you’d have a short broom. As a cultural dramaturg, you want to give options to your director."
This isn’t her first project with one of Toossi’s plays. Bayat worked as a dialect coach on her Pulitzer Prize-winning English at Melbourne Theatre Company, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Alliance Theatre, Barrington Stage, The Old Globe and Studio Theatre, where she also worked as the cultural and casting consultant.
It’s a natural role that came out of an unconventional childhood. Bayat’s “lived experiences” come from a childhood and early adulthood spent in her native Iran. Her father was an actor in film and theatre who used to make home videos with a Super 8 camera—when he wasn’t instilling a love of the stage and the arts in his daughter. Nader Bayat taught Ana the Stanislavski Method, and in the process, set her on her life’s course.
“He said to me, ‘If someone were to say to you that if you couldn’t work in theatre or show business, what else would you want to do?’ If I started thinking about it, he’d say ‘Wrong. The answer is nothing.’ I started watching a lot of interviews and films and realized I have to dedicate myself to the arts,” she said.
Bayat went to London to study English, Theatre, Language and Linguistics, Language Teaching, Literature, Audiovisual Translation and Film Studies, building plenty of fallback options. Along the way, she added English to the Persian (Farsi), French and Spanish she already knew. Bayat is fluent in those four languages and proficient in German, Italian and Catalan. And she realized that she could teach languages and dialects in between acting gigs.
This is how she met Glenn Close. Bayat moved to a suburb of Barcelona, Spain when she was a child. But in her early teens, her family had to move back to Iran for financial reasons. While back in Iran, Bayat kept up her pursuit of a career in the arts, working with the same drama teacher her father did. She kept up on what was happening in cinema by watching pirated movies smuggled in on Betamax tapes and provided by a shadowy man going door-to-door carrying a triple-locked suitcase full of American movies. Bayat watched Close in Fatal Attraction among other roles.
Fast forward three-plus decades. Bayat got an email in the depths of the pandemic from Paper Entertainment, a UK-based production company. They were producing a series for Apple+ TV called “Tehran,” a thriller based on a Mossad agent charged with infiltrating Iran to destroy that country’s nuclear reactor. Close played CIA Agent Dr. Marjan Montazemi on the series’ second season and the producers contacted Bayat—at first, cryptically—to coach Close on speaking Farsi.
“They didn’t tell me who I would be working with, that I’d be working with the legendary Glenn Close,” she said. “I underwent several interviews and I felt like I was auditioning in a way. I had to send out several videos of me doing several accents and in the end, they revealed who I would be working with.
“I flashed back to my 15-year-old self, who was so sad I had to leave Spain and my happy place to go back to a war-torn Iran and the arms of the new regime. Who could have told me as that little girl that one day, she’d be coaching Glenn Close from San Francisco and eventually becoming friends? … It was this sense of ‘Have I arrived?’”
In several ways, she had. Bayat coached Close three times a week via Zoom, drawing praise from the actor in a People Magazine story describing how she approached the task.
On Wish You Were Here, Bayat approaches the dialect work with the actors focusing largely on the cadence and training the actors to emphasize words as a native Persian speaker would when an English sentence contains Persian phrases or expressions, or when certain words in English have various pronunciations. Approaching a line that contains two languages requires training your brain to change gears and Bayat said it’s one of the biggest challenges actors can face.
“An actor needs to be super, super aware of where the emphasis goes in a word in its original form whether in the English language or in Persian,” she said. “You can’t apply the same cadence you would in one language to the other in the same sentence. You have Persian words and you have to say them the way an Iranian would, not as an English speaker. Those are the things we’ve been working on, whether a person speaks Persian or not.”
Bayat has arrived on other fronts, also. She is an award-winning playwright, with her multilingual, autobiographical play Mimi’s Suitcase earning the Neda Nobari Foundation Matching Grant in Innovative Arts and being named “a hidden gem” at the 70th Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
“Mimi’s Suitcase (written in 2015) is ironically set from 1984 to 1992, so there’s a little overlap there with Wish You Were Here. …” she said. “It’s a solo show where I got to play 27 characters and speak four languages. I kept thinking that nobody knows and nobody talks about what’s really happening in Iran and as time is passing, not only does the issue not get diminished in importance, but you have all these things happening.”
Bayat said it was difficult to continue to pursue life as an artist representing her culture of origin while navigating the complexities of identity in diaspora. But the lessons she learned from her father about pursuing a life in the arts never left her.
“We’re keeping the flame alive,” she said.
Experience Bayat’s behind-the-scenes work with the talented cast of Wish You Were Here, playing through Feb. 2 on the Julianne Argyros Stage.