Leila (Deniz Khateri) and Jake (Addy Marsh) try to maintain a long-distance relationship despite Muslim travel ban (photo by Mari Eimas-Dietrich)
SUNSET, ECLIPSED BY SEAGULLS
The Tank
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Through October 13, $25-$50 (use code TANKFRIEND to save $5)
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Iranian American actor, writer, and director Deniz Khateri explores a complicated long-distance relationship in Sunset, Eclipsed by Seagulls, a fact-based drama continuing at the Tank through October 13. Codirected by Siobhán Carroll, the eighty-minute play begins shortly before President Donald Trump’s January 2017 Muslim travel ban, Executive Orders 13769 and 13780: Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States, and concludes in April 2023, when discussions about the US-Iran nuclear deal resume after five years.
Leila (Khateri), who is Iranian, and Jake (Addy Marsh), who is American, meet in Paris and begai a passionate three-month romance, but now she is stuck in her home country while he is in the States. The two thirtysomethings communicate over the internet, commiserating that they cannot be physically together; Marsh is onstage, in Jake’s apartment, carrying his laptop from a desk to the mattress, while Khateri is seen in a large projection on a white sheet on the back wall. The audience of about fifty people sit on three sides of the stage. (The set was designed in consultation with Sadra Tehrani, with moody lighting by Zoe Griffith and sound and music by Bahar Royaee.)
By the time the ban ends and they can be in each other’s arms again, their situations have changed and they have to reevaluate who they are and what they want.
Each scene begins with projected text updating the status of the travel ban and the tenuous relations between Iran and the United States, which Carroll and Khateri try to connect with what is happening between Jake and Leila — but it can be a bit of a stretch as it reaches back to the 1970s — and concludes with poetic dream monologues by Jake accompanied by the sounds of water, from drips to ocean waves, emphasizing the separation between the lovers.
“Let no one know I’m doomed to distance. / I live by the endless ocean. / The sun burns my eyes. / I can smell the seagulls screaming. But I can’t hold them,” he says. “I’m imprisoned by the woods. / I put the woods around me to feel safe, to sleep deeply
in the shade. / Safe from the sun, safe from the seagulls. / But the sun is always there. Even at night. / It calls me from the end of the ocean, a flame . . . finds its way through the woods.”
The play gets bogged down in the second half, when the couple reunites and the characters make questionable choices. The interplay of distant longing followed by present reality recalls how people were apart during the pandemic, forced to meet over Zoom, then sometimes experiencing difficulty readjusting to being out in the world again.
Khateri (Automated Response, We All Used to Be Sane) is lovely as Leila, sexy and self-assured, her big eyes filled with emotion, but Marsh (Mi Abuela, Queen of Nightmares) can’t quite keep up with her as his character becomes more and more unlikable and obtuse and the plot devolves into hard-to-fathom melodrama. But Sunset, Eclipsed by Seagulls has its tender, thoughtful moments as it explores the need for humans to be together, sometimes regardless of the consequences.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]