Hidden Theatre, at the Greenview Arts Center.
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The most dangerous sort of radical is the one who acts in accordance with a personal vision. Tahereh, the 19th-century Irani poet whose life and teachings helped found the Baha’i faith, was such a revolutionary. Ezzat Goushegir’s Behind the Curtains paints a heroic portrait of the young woman whose father broke with Islamic tradition to give her an education, even allowing her to study the Koran, only to find himself the father of a full-blown crusader. After a pilgrimage to her teacher’s shrine, Tahereh left her family to travel among strangers, in the company of men, whom she permitted to see her unveiled face–abominations to conservative Moslems then as now–all in the name of a messiah preaching a new gospel that propounded, among other outrages, men’s and women’s spiritual and temporal equality.
