Domenique Lozano, Leyla Mordizadeh, Bridgette Loriaux

ICU follows five Iranian women during the 2022 “Women, Life, Freedom” protests. When the regime shoots protestors in the eyes to silence them, these women persist and find ways to survive—through humor, defiance, and impossible courage. A play about what it costs to demand your humanity, and what it takes to keep fighting. With some laughs.

Written by Domenique Lozano and Leyla Mordizadeh.
Performed by Bridgette Loriaux.

ICU is a full length play that illuminates the events and human experiences of Iran’s 2022-2023 “Women, Life, Freedom” protests through the intersecting lives of five women. The title operates on three simultaneous levels:

1. It references the Intensive Care Units where injured protesters are hunted by regime forces. 
2. It declares “I see you”—the fundamental demand of protestors to be witnessed and recognized.
3. It evokes the eye itself, that miracle of sight which becomes both weapon and symbol throughout the narrative. 

The play refuses simple categorization, insisting instead on holding tragedy and comedy, brutality and grace, despair and hope in the same frame—because this is how we humans actually survive the unsurvivable.

We’re not interested in creating trauma porn. The world has seen enough images of Middle Eastern suffering presented as isolated suffering, without humor, without the full complexity of human experience. Instead, ICU expands the lens through which Western audiences view resistance in the Middle East, revealing women who are not merely victims but architects of their own defiance, who crack jokes in the darkest moments, who choose how their stories end even when all power has been stripped from them.

The play begins on a morning in the midst of the Women Life Freedom movement. There’s hope in the air.  The narrative then moves chronologically forward, tracking the aftermath of this specific day and night. The play employs  a kind of magical realism to interrupt linear time and these interruptions take several forms: choreographed movement sequences where protests sweep across the stage like weather systems, moments when the women burst into song and dance, instances where time cracks open, allowing us to see what these women dream of, what they remember, what they refuse to surrender.

Music and movement create a theatrical language, expressing what cannot be spoken under regime surveillance, revealing connection, desire and at times violence that lies beyond words. The choreography of protest—bodies moving in collective courage, desire and intention—becomes a central vocabulary of the play.

Projections appear throughout the production, displaying text message exchanges and phone communications between characters onstage and those beyond reach.

Daria –  fifteen years old and luminous with the particular courage of youth that doesn’t yet fully comprehend mortality. She’s all possibility, all forward motion, full of passion, full of the confidence that she can change the course of things. She sneaks away to join the protests without her parents’ knowledge because she cannot fathom not participating in the creation of a more just world. Daria represents not just innocence but the future itself—what Iran could become if her generation were allowed to flourish. She represents what’s at stake when regimes brutalize their own children, and her trajectory through the play asks: what happens to hope when it meets calculated violence?

Zoha – she’s spent eight years studying in the United States to become a medical doctor.  Finally able to return to Tehran to visit family, she carries the particular displacement of someone who’s left their homeland for many years, only to realize they no longer fully belong to either culture. She sneaks to the protest, intending only to witness from a distance, to observe rather than participate. But witnessing pulls her inward—she can’t remain safely at the margins. Her character arc explores the question of responsibility: what do we owe to the places we’ve left? Can you return home after becoming someone else?

Tara – Zoha’s sister, she works as a nurse at a Tehran hospital. The years of separation from Zoha have created a gap between them wider than geography—they love each other but don’t really know each other anymore. Tara doesn’t attend protests wanting to remain neutral, outside of the political landscape. She tries to walk an impossible line: appearing compliant enough to avoid regime suspicion while using her position to care for injured protestors who arrive at the hospital. She embodies the compromises that survival demands of us, the daily negotiations with power that exhaust the soul. Through Tara, we explore what the cost of staying is, of continuing to live inside a system that’s designed to crush you. She begins the play insisting on ‘neutrality’, only to realize that being female under these conditions render it impossible to remain apolitical. 

Shabnam– she’s middle-aged and tired. She’s participated in movements before, knowing how these stories tend to end. But she’s determined to show up, to continue to resist even without the fuel of hope, operating instead on something more concrete, more durable: commitment. Shabnam carries the weight and the bitterness of historical disappointment while and yet finds a black humor inside of refusing to abandon the struggle. Alongside Zaftab, surprisingly she holds much of the play’s comedy, the twisted humor that emerges when you’ve seen too much to be shocked anymore.

Zaftab – she’s twenty-five, privileged, her glass perpetually half-full. She comes to the protest seeking meaning, wanting to participate in something larger than her comfortable life. She hasn’t experienced real struggle before, living a sheltered and protected life, and this simultaneously makes her vulnerable and grants her a specific kind of courage—the bravery of those who haven’t yet learned to be afraid. Zaftab’s natural enthusiasm and optimism create friction and comedy against Shabnam’s weariness and bluntness, but it also reveals a different kind of strength. They are in a strange way, a political Laurel and Hardy. Zaftab comes to the resistance primarily through her curiosity and a desire to be part of a meaningful collective action. 

The Man – he plays all of the male roles in the play: the loving brother, devoted husband, brutal police commander. Artistically, this choice creates an extraordinary opportunity for an actor to embody the full spectrum of masculinity under an authoritarian regime, from tender to monstrous. Thematically, it suggests how patriarchy and state violence flow through individual men in different concentrations, how the same structures that enable tenderness in one context demand brutality in another. 

The Eye as Metaphor and Reality

One of our main characters, Zoha, is studying to become an ophthalmologist. At key moments, she steps outside the narrative action to describe the mechanics and magic of the eye – as if she were giving a lecture to 1st year students. These moments are meditations on the miracle of sight itself, as well as framing the extraordinary power of a small organ in relation to a much larger system. 

The Iranian security forces’ tactic of shooting protestors specifically in the eyes is not metaphorical—it is a documented strategy. By targeting vision, they accomplish multiple objectives: they identify protestors when they seek medical care, create visible marks of punishment and warning, and literally rob people of their ability to see and be seen. They turn the eye—that organ of witness and connection—into a site of terror.

But in making sight a weapon, the regime also makes it a symbol of resistance. Some characters escape Iran, carrying the loss of their sight as a talisman of the regime’s brutality. Tara, a nurse who treats these injuries without reporting them or interrupts the ubiquitous obedience to authority with the tiniest of actions, participates in quiet and intimate defiance. 

Characters’ choices, behaviors reflect courage, cowardice, resilience, kindness, and brutality. 

Do we dare to keep our gaze locked on what is happening? 

The play asks: How do we see the world? How do we see ourselves? What do we choose to see, and what do we refuse to see? Who has the power to determine what is visible? 

Acts of Resistance: Small and Large

Resistance in ICU operates across a spectrum, from gestures so small they’re almost invisible to sacrifices that reverberate across the narrative.

Small resistances include: singing the Beatles’ “Come Together” in a prison visiting room, the melody itself a declaration of solidarity; a nurse who delays unlocking a door for thirty crucial seconds, allowing someone to hide; the bringing of food to a prisoner when resources are scarce; the smuggling of letters, the persistence of laughter when everything insists on grief.

Larger resistances include: attending protests despite the certainty of violence; choosing to return to the streets after being injured; embracing the loss of an eye not as an end but as fuel for continued action; and the ultimate resistance of choosing the direction of your fate. 

And then there are the resistances that exist in the liminal space between self-destruction and self-determination. In one scene, rendered through magical realism, police forces capture a young protestor and attempt to throw her from the roof of a parking structure. In the moment before they can complete this act—before they can claim this violence as their victory—she escapes their hands and chooses to step off the edge herself. It is a devastating moment, one that refuses easy interpretation. Is this suicide or is it reclamation? Is it despair or is it the final assertion of agency? The play holds this tension without resolving it, honoring the impossible choices that tyranny creates.

Why This Play Refuses Easy Answers

We are writing against a tradition of Middle Eastern narratives that present suffering without complexity, victims without agency, brutality without humor. The Iranian women we are writing about—and the Iranian diaspora we are in conversation with—are not one-dimensional. They are funny. They are petty. They get crabby. They come to a larger understanding of themselves. They find unexpected courage. They contradict themselves. They are, in other words, fully human.

ICU insists on holding multiple truths simultaneously: This is happening and it is unbearable. This is happening and people are still laughing. This is happening and it might fail. This is happening and it is already succeeding. These women are victims of state violence. These women are architects of resistance. Hope is naive. Hope is a choice. Beauty exists alongside horror. In fact, beauty insists on existing specifically because of horror.

We want audiences to feel shaken and also strangely hopeful—not because we’ve provided false comfort, but because they’ve seen evidence of what humans are capable of even in extremity. 

The Global Resonance

While ICU is specifically about Iran’s “Women, Life, Freedom” movement, it speaks to this moment of global democratic backsliding. Authoritarian leaders worldwide are deploying similar tactics: controlling women’s bodies as a means of asserting state power, targeting youth movements, using violence to instill fear, attempting to make resistance invisible by literally and figuratively blinding populations to injustice through censorship.

The play asks questions that transcend geography: How do those without institutional power stand against impossible power structures? How do we loosen the grip of tyranny? How do we find grace inside brutality? How do we engender hope not as naive optimism but as active practice? What are the human costs of this moment on our planet, and what are the human triumphs happening in the margins of despair?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions that keep people awake at night in Tehran and also in Russia, Budapest, Myanmar, Hong Kong, the United States, and hundreds of other places. They are the questions that define our contemporary moment.

What We Are Building

ICU is ambitious in scope and intimate in execution. It demands theatrical imagination, artists who are willing to create a visual and aural language that can hold realism and poetry in the same breath. It requires audiences willing to feel complicated things without the relief of simple conclusions. 

We are building a play that honors the courage of Iranian women while refusing to flatten them into symbols. We are creating a theatrical experience that is as formally adventurous as it is emotionally rigorous. We are writing toward hope without dishonesty, toward beauty without denial, toward comedy without minimization.

Most importantly, we are insisting that these women be seen—not as victims to be pitied, not as heroes to be elevated beyond humanity, but as full, complex, contradictory, funny, fierce, tired, brave, scared, brilliant people who are living through history and refusing to be erased by it.