Under the Radar Review: Blind Runner and the Race for Freedom in Iran

Blindness is not necessarily an impediment to competitive running. Guide runners help blind athletes become some of the fastest people in the world, but it requires a special relationship of trust and intimacy—which is the basis of writer-director Amir Reza Koohestani’s Blind Runner, now appearing at St. Ann’s Warehouse as part of Under the Radar in a joint production of Waterwell, Nimruz, and Koohestani’s own Mehr Theatre Group. A fascinating premise executed with frustrating lethargy, it’s unlikely to leave anyone’s pulse racing.

Much of the play takes place in an Iranian prison where a man (Mohammad Reza Hosseinzadeh) visits his wife (Ainaz Azarhoush), who is serving at least another four years, six months, and 12 days, presumably for political offenses (in his program note, Koohestani mentions Niloofar Hamedi, a journalist who was imprisoned in 2022 for reporting on the death of Mahsa Amini and whose husband is a distance runner). While their conversations are necessarily restrained (they are being surveilled), she encourages him to accompany the blind runner Parissa (also Azarhoush, but with her eyes closed) to Paris to serve as her guide runner.

Jealousy rears its ugly head, albeit in the emotionless style Koohestani has adopted (realistically) for these prison visits. “I heard that the girls who get shot in the eyes are often very beautiful,” the wife remarks, offering our first hint at how Parissa lost her eyesight. Initially reluctant to leave Iran and his imprisoned wife, the husband does travel to France only to be blindsided by Parissa’s secret plan for a spectacular act of protest.

Koohestani’s sloppily constructed plot raises plenty of questions: If Parissa really lost her eyesight in an anti-government demonstration, how is she now able to travel abroad and represent the Islamic Republic in international competition?

The audience has plenty of time to contemplate such plot holes as the actors run back and forth across the stage in moody corridors of light (designed by Éric Soyer) and discuss the psychology of running. The video design (by Yasi Moradi and Benjamin Krieg) and original music (by Phillip Hohenwarter and Matthias Peyker) help to create a hypnotic vibe, which doesn’t really benefit this already sleepy play.  If you do attempt the hourlong slog, I recommend caffeinating beforehand.

The actors are blameless, bringing palpable humanity to their characters that glimmers through the bars of this dramaturgical jail cell. Azarhoush is especially good at endowing words and phrases with hidden meaning, her penetrating gaze seeming to probe for any sign of weakness or wavering faith from Hosseinzadeh’s husband, who responds by pulling his cards even closer to his chest.

But neither performance can salvage the fundamentally inert production that hangs on the flimsy skeleton of Koohestani’s script. It’s baffling because this story of political dissidents surviving within a geriatric theocracy should come with baked-in life-or-death stakes (for a new film that exploits social friction in Iran to much more thrilling effect, I highly recommend Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig).

And yet when the climactic moment finally arrives in Blind Runner, the audience greets it with deafening silence—not, I suspect, out of shock, but out of disbelief that this half-baked play is really over. It’s hard not to feel like our guide has abandoned us to cross the finish line by himself.