Crafting Autofiction Through Collaboration

Multidisciplinary artist SB Tennent originally conceived Iranian Girlfriend as an autobiographical essay. With financial support and a full creative team, the piece expanded into a three-woman theatrical work of autofiction for its New York premiere in September 2025. Iranian Girlfriend explores the complex relationship between fact and fiction, offering fresh perspectives on womanhood and belonging as a first-generation American. Georgia Evans, the production’s dramaturg and assistant costume designer, sat down with SB Tennent, director-writer-performer, prior to its performances to discuss the production’s origins, her devising process, and the complicated nature of autofiction. Iranian Girlfriend ran from 20 September to 4 October 2025 at MITU580, presented by Built4Collapse in collaboration with New Georges. This work was developed, in part, with support from Theater Mitu’s Artists-At-Home Program, with thanks for support from Brooklyn Arts Council, the Puffin Foundation, a New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Support for Artists grant, and The Anna Sosenko Assist Trust.

Georgia Evans: Iranian Girlfriend has been in development for quite some time. Can you give us a glimpse into the production’s history?

SB Tennent: The piece goes way back to 2018. I was taking a nonfiction writing class and had to write an essay about a moment in time that happened on the same day I was born. I said, "I'm going to write about the Challenger explosion because I know that I was born on the day the Challenger exploded. My mother's been telling me this for years." I Google it. Turns out I was not born on the day that the Challenger exploded. It was not even possible. Of course, when I talked to my mother later, she goes, "You weren't born on the day the Challenger exploded. I never said that." So, I don't know where the lie started anymore.

I ended up writing about what I thought happened on the day I was born, about how the Challenger exploded on 28 January, and how for so long I thought it happened on the day I was born. But it was also about my immigrant mother, how she moved here when an actor was president, and all these things that were in and of themselves sort of dissociative. These big moments, these big, traumatic moments.

I read the essay out loud in class, and the other students were like, "You should perform this." So that was the beginning. I did a small piece of it at the PRELUDE Festival in 2019. Simultaneously I was having all these ideas for a show about a bunch of women I was obsessed with—Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, all these poets—that I explored at a New York Theatre Workshop summer residency. Then, right before the pandemic, I got into the New Georges Audrey Residency, and that residency extended far longer than expected because of the pandemic. That’s when I really started to develop the work. This piece started out as a sort of solo show then shifted to a TV pilot because I thought I was never going to leave my house again. When things started to open up, it shifted again, this time into a full-on play with a bunch of different characters. Eventually, I ended up streamlining back down. I was trying to find the throughline, and I was like, "Let's see what happens if the throughline is me."

New Georges extended their support, and it was presented In collaboration with New Georges as part of a new artist service program through which they actively partner with artists to steward independent productions of new works, supported by Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation.

That got me motivated, and I started to see the future of the thing in production. Laura Elliot, my producing partner at Built4Collapse, helped me apply for a mess of other grants, and we got some them.

So now we have approximately $35,000 to put up a three-week run in New York City with a full design team and three performers. And here's the thing: I'm not a playwright, I'm not a writer. I'm a director, and I'm a maker. Whenever I get into a room with other people, that’s when it grows. At the same time, that growth depends on who those people are. Now, with the cast, we've found a sort of shape that it exists in that feels more like an ensemble piece. It has taken seven years to get to that.

I feel like I can hand off pieces of the story to them that I didn't feel like I could hand off before.

Georgia: That’s exciting. How did you go about building community when curating the Iranian Girlfriend team?

SB: Every single person on the team has awed me with their mastery in some other project, either one we've worked on together or one I’ve witnessed. Also, I’m naturally excited by people who come from different backgrounds, and it brings together unique teams. With this piece, I'm also finding a really strong community with the ensemble that is new to me. All three performers—Shiva Kiani, Asal Takesh, and myself—are Iranian. That's new and different and interesting and exciting, and it has opened up how the story can be told. It creates a certain kind of trust that's different because I feel like I can hand off pieces of the story to them that I didn't feel like I could hand off before. That has been really special.

Georgia: So, the political landscapes in both the United States and Iran are constantly changing. How do these shifting landscapes show up in your work?

SB: When I was younger, I had a different experience of current events and what they meant to my work. When I started Red Wednesday, a play written and devised with my collective Built4Collapse, it was during the Green Revolution. Then, the Arab Spring and the Gezi Park protests erupted, and that colored the work in a new way. It all seemed relevant, but as the world in front of me developed, I struggled to keep building theatrical material. The current events kept shifting; the landscape changed and disappeared or flipped upside down. It felt like I was always playing catch up, as I tried to keep a tab on the global perspective in a way that felt relevant a year or three years later. Through the development of that piece, Red Wednesday, I realized that the only way to get at a lasting narrative was to tie it to people as opposed to a big idea, and then let the big ideas grow from there.

I leave a lot of room between scenes for additional narrative to find its way depending on what year the show premieres in. It's in those transitions between scenes that I put my own point of view more pointedly on the piece. Ultimately, that becomes a thing we figure out with design.

I've also noticed that other people, including collaborators and audience members, read my work with completely different perspectives on what is political, what is not political, and what I'm expressing/saying. I intentionally leave space or room for interpretation, a little bit of emptiness or openness in narratives, so that the audience can find themselves in it and attach their own stories to it. That might happen through silence or visuals or through a lack of dialogue that requires the audience to work harder to figure out what's going on.

If things are falling apart, directing is where I know I can go and make it better.

Georgia: So you're performing, directing, and producing this production. How do you find that you rotate between these positions?

SB: Terribly. But I try not to think about producing when I'm in the room rehearsing, because the producing is a very separate brain space. I have a producing team of Josie Hawley and Laura Elliott, and I wouldn't be able to produce it without them. In terms of the performing, again, it's me and Asal and Shiva. As I am rehearsing right now, I'm starting to really understand how the narrative can work within three people. Then in terms of the directing (my first love), Rhys Luke is the associate director, and they’re exquisite. The two of us bounce off of each other in rehearsal. They're the eyes, and then I'm the eyes. The character that I play is in a lot of ways a director, and it's good for the show because I think that's where I function best. If things are falling apart, directing is where I know I can go and make it better.

Georgia: The central character in Iranian Girlfriend is like you in many ways. Why do you think audiences need to see her on stage right now?

SB: I think of her as a survivor, and the way that she's surviving is fun and performative and probably unhealthy. She doesn't understand her lineage, and she uses history and facts (remembered, misremembered, whatever) to try to get closer to some kind of understanding or empathy about women and her current circumstances. She uses Sylvia Plath, or Medea, or the Queen of England; she uses what she understands about history or mythology to unearth some kind of understanding. The goal is to witness this person find a kind of empathy that she didn't have before she started.

That’s what theatre can do, what theatre is really good at: To create a space of empathy for people, for a lot of different kinds of people.

But we'll see how it works out. It might just be fun.

Georgia: Speaking of fun, I had the pleasure of helping you create looks for a photo shoot, dressing you up as sixteen different characters for a slideshow in the middle of the play. Collaborating with you on this was fun and deeply rewarding. Where do you find the joy in theatre to counterbalance the stress of mounting a production?

The idea that it started out as an essay, that it was a one woman show about life and my story… It was through the connections to people that it came to life. I could not do any of this alone, nor would I want to.

SB: I find joy because I have to. If it's not going to be fun, then no one's going to do it with you. There have to be moments of joy inside the difficulty of putting together the work to make it worth the time.

My drive to make the work comes from a deep need to put something creative into the world amidst so much destruction and demolition. My way of countering is through creation. I feel like my activism is to create in places that have been blasted by so much—to make the joy, to find joy where so much sadness exists. I'm really lucky that I live in New York and am surrounded by a community that is interested in that joy as well.

With Iranian Girlfriend, even though she talks about a lot of hard stuff, she does it with a wink and some joy and a lightness. It’s worthwhile to move through the world with a little bit of that; otherwise, it gets really heavy.

Georgia: Many elements of this play are pulled from your real life, and many are fictional, even absurd. How do you approach weaving fictional elements into the nonfiction?

SB: I learned a lot from Susan Bernfield at New Georges about that, in the process of writing this piece. The dramatic arc is always the winner. There are pieces of my life that can be inciting incidents or interesting backstory, or they can make a character specific and drive motivation. But I'm not that interesting. The dramatic arc or where the story wants to go is what I follow.

You have to feed the story what the story wants to be, not fit the story to your real life. It's autofiction. As it got more fictive, I started to push it further in that direction and gave myself the freedom to really dream, which opened up everything. If it’s too close to myself, I feel like I have to be true to something or honor something that I don't have to honor if it's not real.

Georgia: What do you hope audiences will take away from this production?

SB: Prizes. I hope they will take away prizes. Seriously. I hope we can get some donations, and they can take home candy.

But really, I hope that they take away that you need other people. I think that's what is at the center of it. It's where I'm trying to shape the ending. Even the idea that it started out as an essay, that it was a one woman show about life and my story… It was through the connections to people that it came to life. I could not do any of this alone, nor would I want to. Maybe that's something that also our character has to realize inside the play: You need other people, and you also have to ask for help sometimes.

Also, I hope the audience leaves feeling like they had a good time. I'm not trying to school anybody. I want audiences to come in and leave in a state of—I mean, this is a tall order—ecstasy. I want them to come in, have a great time, and then go out and want to have more of a good time, because we are here for such a short period.

To me, the important thing is—I can't believe I'm saying this. It's so gushy and gross—to be with each other. To be in rooms with each other, to enjoy what we're seeing, and then to be able to go out and talk about how you loved and hated it. It’s important just to live presently in this really weird world.