Scene with Play

Scene with Play as the latest work of Mahdi Pourrezaeian, a playwright and researcher in the field of theater, written on the topic of children’s and adolescent theater as well as psychodrama techniques in schools, is considered a notable work from several perspectives. On one hand, the author is a professional and continuous actor in the theater field, who has for years been a journalist and commentator for publications such as Tarbiyat, Sahneh, and Negareh, receiving social feedback closely related to his thoughts and writings on theater. In other words, the books, theories, and viewpoints of the author regarding children’s and adolescent theater in elementary and high school levels are not merely the product of his own reflection and writing, but rather the result of his bilateral journalistic interactions refined over years and compiled for public use in book form. On the other hand, Pourrezaeian has been an active academic figure in the recent years in the theater sphere, and his ongoing activity in the Faculty of Arts at Shahed University has helped him develop principles as a theorist and university professor to establish frameworks for teaching performing arts to children starting from the lowest educational levels. In the preface of this work, the author also mentions his specialization in clinical psychology and states that through this expertise, combined with his experiential abilities in theater, he has written about the educational, nurturing, and psychological consequences of elementary school plays and the nature of children’s theater from a psychological perspective. Alongside this, he has attempted to theoretically document efforts to satisfy children’s need for freedom in the domains of thought, expression, and action through education, understanding, and performance of the art of play. From this viewpoint, in the second part of his book, he also shows interest and attention to adolescence and high school as a turning point for the emergence and expression of the child’s individual and group abilities through the art of theater, trying to clarify that the need for knowledge, freedom, and their expression in society is a continuous matter that should be pursued in all groups and age ranges. The final section of the book can be considered one of the author’s ongoing aspirations and ideas regarding the use of the art of theater as an interdisciplinary science. In this section, Pourrezaeian introduces the phenomenon of psychodrama as a therapeutic method popularized in the 20th century and tries to present it as a tool for expressing problems and describing students’ mental pains, chronic tensions, and inner feelings. Using the fact that students often suppress or do not express such issues, he utilizes theater as a means to articulate these pains and conflicts.