TEHRAN – The play “The Dinner Party,” a one-act comedy written by Neil Simon about marriage and divorce, will be performed at the Tehran Theater Complex from February 20.

Amir Masoud Rajabi is the director and producer of the play and also performs in it along with Mohammad Moradi, Mehdi Samimi, Timah Kalateh, Haniyeh Aramideh, and Heliya Ghasemi Jahan.

This is Simon's 31st play. In an interview in The New York Times, Simon said that he was trying to write a play very different from anything he had done before, and that he had the concept of creating a farce up to a certain point, and then, instead of continuing the farce, to make a turn to where it becomes quite serious. [He] wanted to break the concept that farces can never get real, even for a minute.

Here is a decidedly French dinner party served up in a chaotic mode that only a master of comedy could create: Five people are invited to dine at a first-rate restaurant in Paris. They do not know who the other guests will be or why they have been invited. 

Tossed together in a private dining room, they have a sneaking suspicion that this unorthodox dinner party will forever change their lives.

Playwright Neil Simon, himself married five times, mines his own experience to create the thematic material for this unique farce-turned-dramedy. Six unknowing guests have RSVP'd to a dinner at a private dining room in a first-rate restaurant in Paris. Arriving in a staggered manner, they eventually realize they are three divorced couples, providing the makings of the farce that Simon intends the first half of the play to be. Five of them were mistaken into thinking a man they hold in high regard (who happens to be the divorce lawyer) is hosting the party, but he never shows up, and appearances prove to be deceiving.

Claude Pichon and Albert Donay are the first to arrive, and Claude asks what the party is for, but Albert does not know either. As the three male guests arrive first and the female guests later, it only gradually unfolds that they are three divorced couples and that somebody has designs for them to be together.

After the shock wears off, the characters inevitably begin to analyze and emotionally process their past marriages, and the play ends on a hopeful note.

Neil Simon (1927 – 2018) was an American playwright, screenwriter, and author. He wrote more than 30 plays and nearly the same number of movie screenplays, mostly film adaptations of his plays. He received three Tony Awards and a Golden Globe Award, as well as nominations for four Academy Awards and four Primetime Emmy Awards. He was awarded a Special Tony Award in 1975, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1991, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1995, and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2006.

He was one of the most reliable hitmakers in Broadway history, as well as one of the most performed playwrights in the world. 

“The Dinner Party” will remain on stage through March 6 at the Tehran Theater Complex, located at No. 3, Farhangi Alley, Vesal Shirazi St., Enghelab Ave.

SS/SAB