Blind Runner

St. Ann’s forges a momentous new collaboration—with Amir Reza Koohestani, his Mehr Theatre Group, and the award-winning New York-based company Waterwell (The Ford / Hill Project at the Public Theater)—in a work that, like Burnout Paradise, finds a wealth of meaning in an athletic act. Amir Reza Koohestani’s Blind Runner (January 4-19, 2025), performed in Farsi with English supertitles, follows a man whose activist wife—a political prisoner in Iran—impels him to help her friend, a blind woman currently training to run through the Channel Tunnel from France to the UK, in a dangerous feat that must end before the first train crosses the tunnel in the morning. This “mesmerizing” and “stunningly performed” work demonstrates “Koohestani’s classic ability to interweave the personal and the political” and “asks whether athleticism itself is potentially a form of protest” (The Guardian). Blind Runner is presented in partnership with Waterwell and Under the Radar, celebrating its 20th anniversary and its second year as a citywide event. Like last year, when St. Ann’s teamed up with Under the Radar to present Luke Murphy’s Volcano, the partnership between St. Ann’s and Under the Radar reunites two of New York’s unwavering supporters of international theater and celebrates the vitality of their overlapping histories and anniversaries: St. Ann’s hosted the first-ever Under the Radar Festival in 2005.