Toronto Star, Canada
Feb 17 2005
Life tales of the unexpected
Levon Haftvan has unusual past
Directs Pinter and Pirandello plays
ROBERT CREW
ARTS WRITER
World events have a way of entangling Levon Haftvan in their coils —
and changing his life.
As a young theatre graduate of Teheran University, the Iranian-born
Haftvan was showcasing two shows at an international theatre festival
in the Republic of Armenia when his passport was stolen. Because he
couldn’t get back to Iran without a passport, he went to Moscow to
get another from the Iranian Embassy. but the former Soviet Union had
started to collapse and Haftvan found himself stranded.
He waited and waited; it was six months before he finally got his
travel papers. In the meantime, “I started to learn the language and
I started watch theatre again,” says the burly, bearded director, who
now has 25 years’ experience on three continents.
And after a while, he decided to study for an MFA in directing at
Moscow’s Russian Academy of Theatrical Arts. As a Christian, he
explains, he was unable to take a further degree back home in Iran.
“Religious minorities were not allowed to do further degrees in the
humanities,” he says. “I don’t think they wanted professors or
academics who were not Muslim.”
Learning that his travel papers wouldn’t be renewed, Haftvan flew to
Denmark, where he stayed for 10 months before coming to Canada about
10 years ago.
Now, after years of directing community productions, he is mounting
his first professional show here, a double bill of Harold Pinter’s
The Lovers and Luigi Pirandello’s I’m Dreaming but am I?, starring
Brenda Bazinet and John Evans. It opens tonight at Artword Theatre.
The Lover is about a respectable couple that lives out a wild second
life as whore and lover, ultimately shattering the barriers between
fantasy and reality. Haftvan first directed the play at Toronto’s
SummerWorks theatre festival in 2002, losing three or four shows to
the blackout.
Written in 1929, I’m Dreaming explores familiar Pirandello territory,
about the difference (if there is one) between dreams and reality and
how dreams permeate and influence our whole life.
It’s about a woman who is feeling guilty that she no longer loves her
partner and who has a nightmare that he has found out that she is
cheating on him.
“She then wakes up and something else happens,” says Haftvan,
enigmatically.
Haftvan relishes the opportunity to explore such areas of human
experience. “In Iran we didn’t have the chance to work on such things
as eroticism,” he says. “We are allowed to touch all problems except
politics and sexuality.”
Working with Bazinet and Evans is a treat, he adds. “It is amazing. I
am learning a lot in rehearsals.”
Becasuse he is still waiting for landed-immigrant status, Haftvan
can’t get any government funding for his work and is financing the
$30,000 production himself.
The process has been delayed because the government halted all
applications from the Middle East after Sept. 11, 2001, he says.
“About two years ago, I decided, okay, how long it wants to take, it
will take. Let’s do it because life is quick. I only have 20 to 25
years to go and this life is not going to return!”
Haftvan grew up speaking two languages, Armenian and Persian, and has
since added Russian and English.
He started acting when he was 12, inspired, he says, by his father
who wrote poetry and performed on the violin. It was then that he
decided to devote himself to theatre, over the objections of his
parents, who wanted him to train as a doctor or an engineer.
His interest lies firmly in the classics; in the 2004 SummerWorks he
directed a version of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull.
“I like to work on those texts,” he says. “They give me so much more
to explore.”
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