Protests and Pet-shares Break Down Borders: A Look at Sepehr Jafari’s Homing Pigeons & Co
by ReOrient Publications Dramaturg Oona Hatton
As a dramaturgy team member of the fourth partnership between Golden Thread Productions and Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA), ReOrient Publications Dramaturg Oona Hatton uncovers the humor, politics, and heart behind Sepehr Jafari’s Homing Pigeons and Co, receiving its world premiere in ReOrient 2026.
ABOUT OONA HATTON
Oona Hatton (she/her) has been a production and development dramaturg for over two decades. Favorite productions include 11th & Pine, The Four Immigrants: An American Musical Manga, and Arcadia. Oona teaches at SJSU and is co-artistic director of Davis Repertory Theatre, with whom she devises, directs, writes, produces, and, of course, dramaturgs.
The ReOrient Festival has always been about presenting alternative perspectives, and with the world premiere of Sepehr Jafari’s Homing Pigeons & Co, Golden Thread offers an unconventional take on local activism and its global impacts. In an era when popular political theatre is dominated by social realism, Jafari’s surreal approach may make some audiences wonder if the Iranian-born playwright understands the gravity of the current political moment. Rest assured that while the opening image of Homing Pigeons may make audiences feel as disoriented as the characters on stage, this inventive and too-brief play is making very real claims about the importance of connection in chaotic times. And while the dialogue is occasionally absurd, Jafari’s characters are far from oblivious to their real circumstances; rather, they are working imaginatively to assert their humanity and agency in a high-stakes context where these privileges — and at least one of their lives — are under threat.
Two young women sit in a police van — or do they? It is 2022 and protests have erupted worldwide in the wake of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s murder of Mahsa Jina Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman accused of improperly wearing her hijab. Arrested during a demonstration in Tehran, Tina awaits transport to a detention center. Her childhood friend Halan calls out encouragement as she witnesses the arrest from the other side of the globe. As Tina and Halan exchange descriptions of the respective protests they have joined in Iran and the SF Bay Area, a pet goldfish is passed between them. While the play explores the fantastic quality of state-sponsored violence under an authoritarian regime, it also dramatizes the equally bizarre sensation of feeling present while observing horrific events via livestream. Tina and Halan are both experiencing a government crackdown in real time; they experience, narrate, and witness what’s happening via a portal beset with glitches (whether frozen moments are due to poor internet connection or something more supernatural, who can say?). In spite of their different physical and sociopolitical locations, both Tina and Halan grapple with a feeling of powerlessness and a desperation to know that their actions have impact. As they express their outrage, fear, and care for each other, the women play out in miniature the global Woman, Life, Freedom movement instigated by Amini’s murder.
Jafari, who has studied playwriting in Tehran and San Francisco, encourages us to think expansively about dramatic storytelling, and to question whether traditional approaches are able to capture everyone’s reality. They note that Western theatrical storytelling with its specific structures and styles “trains us to experience reality in a certain way. What we view as absurdity might just be another way of experiencing reality.” As a playwright using incongruity to critique oppressive systems, Jafari is in the company of luminaries including Vaçlav Havel, Suzan Lori-Parks, and Wole Soyinka. As in the work of these artists, Homing Pigeons & Co is full of wit. Reflecting on the play’s lighter moments, Jafari shares, “Humor is how I work around traumatic experiences. Being playful around hard emotions is a way to maintain the characters’ dignity.” While we witness Tina’s and Halan’s victimization, we also recognize them as more than their suffering.
Homing Pigeons offers barbed humor in the vein of some of our blackest theatrical comedians: Samuel Beckett, María Irene Fornés, and Sarah Kane. As the danger of Tina’s situation bears down, the young women distract themselves by recalling a chemistry class in which they were asked by their female teacher to carefully observe a still glass of water and “notice” its liquid state. As they listen for the morning Azan (call to prayer), the friends’ rueful reminiscences of the “science experiment” suggest how gender expectations permeate every aspect of the fundamentalist Islamic Republic, from high school curriculum to clothing to the spaces women can occupy. “Chemistry is your maman cooking in the kitchen not learning to make Molotov cocktails,” Tina intones in imitation of their teacher. In this way, the seeming banality of a science lesson is linked to the fines, beatings, sexual assault, incarceration, and murder of women who do not comply with the morality laws of the Islamic Republic. While the former is relatively benign, both the curriculum and the clothing restrictions are disciplinary tactics employed to maintain rigid gender roles. When the Azan finally sounds, Jafari explicitly connects this violence with conservative Islamic doctrine, as Tina tenderly explains to the goldfish, “it’s time to get up and pray but also to get up and hang some people.”
For most Westerners, this is dystopic stuff. The play’s third character is a female cop whose duties “on a normal day” include morality patrolling. The Guidance Patrol, an official branch of the Islamic Republic’s law enforcement wing, makes the rounds of busy spaces, surveilling to enforce dress codes and to disburse groups of mixed genders. While one can argue that the U.S. has morality forces of its own, mobilizing everywhere from school board meetings to the virtual public spheres of Tik Tok and Instagram, they aren’t public servants (yet).
Jafari, who is currently pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies from UC Davis, accepts the characterization of their work as absurd. They cite Ibsen’s perfect five-act play, or conflict between designated protagonists and antagonists, or characters performing specific gender roles, as elements of storytelling that we’ve come to understand and even expect. “This is what you see if you’re always centering a certain kind of writer,” Jafari observes. “But that’s not how I experience my body, my reality. As I saw more non-Western alternatives and leaned into how I genuinely feel things,” they explained, “my writing became weirder.”
Homing Pigeons & Co explores borders — borders between nations, bodies, genders, nationalities, races, and even between life and death. Borders signify somewhere we can’t follow, whether due to sociopolitical controls, the laws of the physical world, or a transformation of our metaphysical state. By giving and receiving love, and by “co-parenting,” as Jafari describes it, their pet fish, Tina and Halan challenge the borders that seek to constrain them. Audiences of Homing Pigeons & Co may ask themselves: What does care look like when individuals cannot be in the same physical space? How are our bodies, minds, and relationships being shaped by larger forces? Beyond seemingly insurmountable, intolerable, or incomprehensible circumstances, what calls us home?
Witness for yourself this boundary-pushing story of friendship, care, and activism at this year’s ReOrient Festival, running October 9 through November 1.