About this collection

The Iranian student movements of the 1960s and 1970 in Berkeley, and the greater Bay Area, gave birth to a number of theater groups. The majority of these theater groups were interested in the Brechtian definition of theater as a tool for political provocation.

In 1985, a small group of theater lovers got together and formed a Farsi-speaking theater group and called it "DARVAG" after a tiny tree frog known for announcing the good news of rain. The Darvag Theater company was born from a tradition where experimentation was an absolute requirement.

While other groups withered, Darvag grew as a center for artistic growth in theater, music, and the performing arts. Its loose structure and collective responsibility model encouraged new talent to express their personal experiences of exile. Thus, Darvag became a center for nurturing original theater work, communicating stories of displacement, exploring and advocating feminism, while also experimenting with different performance styles.

A number of original texts grew out of fbrainstorming and improvisation sessions and workshops. These texts are directly reflective of the Iranian immigrant experience and serve as a form of documentation of the Iranian community's inter-generational history in the US.

Today, Darvag is serving a much larger and greatly-changed community. The group continues to respond to these changes by considering and reflecting upon the bicultural and bilingual aspects of this communit by staging bilingual productions, staging Iranian plays in English, initiating collaborations with other artists, as well as exploring the changing face of the Iranian-American diaspora.