“For years, I’ve learned that in reaction to all the hardships, I could do only one thing: run. Run instead of talk, run instead of cry, run instead of shout, run instead of punch.”

So says the title character at the end of “Blind Runner,” as she announces she will be running through the Channel Tunnel. But this hour-long show at St. Ann’s Warehouse is not really about her, nor about running. Or, more precisely, what it’s about is running as a symbol of the fight for freedom.  “Blind Runner” is a hauntingly staged production, presented in Farsi with English surtitles, heavy on symbolism but light on details, that’s a lyrical response to political repression in Iran (and also, less emphatically, to wrongheaded immigration policies in Europe; she’s planning to run through the underseas tunnel as a way to sneak into England.)   

This is laid out less explicitly on stage than in a page-long note in the program by its writer and director Amir Reza Koohestani, who explains how he was inspired by specific political events in Iran.

Koohestani himself began running after the failure of the Green Movement in Iran in 2009, “as an alternative to the demonstrations that were no longer being held and the freedom that had left us again….Freedom is a state, just like running; you set yourself an imaginary goal of moving from point A to point B…but your goal…is [really] to experience the freedom In between.” Thirteen  years later, journalist Niloofar Hamedi’s coverage of the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Morality Police for violating the dress code led to Woman Life Freedom, another popular protest movement in Iran. For her reporting, the Iranian authorities jailed Hamedi.  A former sports reporter and an experienced marathon runner, Hamedi began running in the prison yard, and her husband Mohamad Hossein Ajorlou, who used to participate in marathons with her, began running in marathons in her honor, as part of a campaign for her release. Although the playwright tells us that others continue to run in marathons as part of the campaign, it hasn’t worked; she is still a political prisoner. 

 “Blind Runner” takes the basic situation and runs with it, although not very far. The first half of the play is taken up with stilted conversations, reflecting a strained relationship, between an unnamed husband (portrayed by Mohammad Reza Hosseinzadeh) and unnamed wife (Ainaz Azarhoush) when he pays weekly visits to her in prison. They most often face the audience when they talk to one another, and always keep apart. There is minimal staging, dark lighting, occasional dim oversized projections, so we know they are separated by a glass partition, and under constant video surveillance, because they tell us so.

About halfway through the play, the wife has asked her husband to serve as a guide to a blind runner, Parissa (also portrayed by Azarhoush), after Parissa’s mother, also an inmate in the prison, asked the wife for help in finding a guide.   The husband reluctantly agrees.

The scenes then alternate between the husband and Parissa literally running back and forth on the stage, and the husband talking about it with his wife.

Their conversations are elliptical (intentionally, not due to the translation.) But we do eventually learn how much the husband resents his wife for doing something political (a vague allusion to a post) that results in her imprisonment, forcing both of them into solitude. And we do eventually learn how Parissa became blind. And if all this is presented obliquely, we are eventually led to realize that the point of the play is how personal — how intimate — political repression can be. 

Blind Runner is at St. Ann’s Warehouse through January 24. “Unseen Iran,” will turn the theater’s lobby into a Persian Tea Room (featuring Persian tea, rugs, and art) from January 10 to 12