Ava Alavi has a history of activism in Iran, particularly in support of women’s rights.Erik Stolpmann/Supplied
Ava Alavi will never return home.
If she does, the theatre-maker says she’s been told she’ll be arrested as soon as she sets foot on Iranian soil: She has a history of activism in the country, particularly in support of women’s rights. When she immigrated to Canada in 2022 to study at the University of Ottawa, she started speaking out more publicly in support of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in the custody of Iran’s morality police in 2022.
Iranian authorities took notice of Alavi’s outrage.
“My parents got a call from the authorities and were called in for questioning,” says Alavi, 30. “They put a file in front of them that made it clear they knew everything about me, and I’m not important at all. They told my parents that if I came back, I’d be arrested at the airport.”
In February, Alavi closed her show Sound as part of Undercurrents Festival in Ottawa. The play combines Alavi’s autobiography with a crash course on recent Iranian history, with a particular interest in women’s rights and Iran’s complicated relationship with its leaders since the revolution in 1979.
The play has taken on new significance in recent weeks: On Feb. 28, Israel and the U.S. launched joint air strikes on Iran, killing supreme leader Ali Khamenei and jump-starting a new wave of chaos for the country. The internet blackouts Alavi describes in the play have become more common, meaning Iranians can’t easily reach their friends and family abroad – in Sound, Alavi frames her story with an emotionally charged video call to a friend back home. (No matter how hard she wishes for it, the call never connects.)
The Globe and Mail spoke with Alavi about her play, as well as what it means for Iranian artists around the world to speak out in solidarity with their home country.
Ms. Alavi’s 'Sound' is a play that combines her autobiography with a crash course on recent Iranian history.Erik Stolpmann/Supplied
When did you start writing Sound?
One week after I made it to Canada. I was at a point when I wanted to go back to Iran, but my parents wouldn’t let me, which was smart, on their part. I was being impulsive and emotional.
But then the playwriting process started. I kept hearing strange stories about the victims and their families, and every story was extremely dramatic. I wanted to write about them. That process went on for four or five months, but then I realized I needed to think about why the Woman, Life, Freedom movement felt so important to me specifically. I completely understood why it was happening, but I couldn’t explain it to non-Iranians.
So I started tracing my own life, and I tried to figure out where my frustration and anger was coming from – I reached back as far as my childhood and realized that no, it goes back further, to my mom. So I started writing about her, and my own personal identity, and I saw how much my experience could reflect the collective identity of Iranian women.
In Sound, you refer to a photograph that you say is famous for Iranians – at the end of the show, you reveal that your mom is featured prominently in the image. Is that really her?
That’s really her. When I was little, that photo was so cool to me. But when I grew up, I started having a lot of mixed feelings about it – what was she thinking? But it’s amazing to look at it and know she was one of the people who actually stood up for what was right at the time.
There’s no way for somebody who hasn’t lived an Iranian life to fully emotionally grasp how that feels. In the show, I’m trying to recreate the effect that those famous photographs on Revolution Street might have – it hits different when you have a reference for who the people are in the photo. Every time I tell that story, it hits people a little bit differently.
I also wanted people to see photos from Iran, from the era before, to see that these were normal people. They dressed just like the West at the time. There’s so much power in those kinds of images.
'Sound' has taken on new significance in recent weeks as conflict has erupted in the Middle East.Erik Stolpmann/Supplied
You frame Sound with a video call to your friend in Iran – a call that never goes through. Have you heard from your friend since the war broke out? Your family?
I haven’t heard directly from her since, but I’ve heard from a friend of a friend that she’s still alive, just arrested. But it’s such an uncertain situation. I’ve heard from my family – they’ve moved somewhere with less bombing, even though there’s bombing everywhere at this point. They were okay when I heard from them three days ago.
So much has happened in Iran since you immigrated to Canada, including the current conflict as well as the Twelve-Day War in 2025. How has it felt to keep working on Sound amidst ongoing uncertainty at home?
My relationship to the material has changed. I’m less emotional about it now, which actually helped when I was revising it in the lead-up to Undercurrents.
The longer I’m away from Iran, I feel like I have less of a right to talk about certain things – it’s a kind of survivor’s guilt. But this project also pushed me to talk more with people still in Iran, especially the sections about war.
In the play, I split my character into three versions of myself: the part of me still stuck in Iran, the part of me trying to hold everything together internally and the part of me that interacts with the outside world while I try to function here in Canada. The play was written primarily for a non-Iranian audience – Iranian audiences already know the experiences I’m talking about. My goal was to give non-Iranians a more personal view into what we live through. Sharing the personal context helps people realize that anyone could be living through something like this.
This interview has been edited and condensed.