Upon arrival at Prologue Theatre’s regional premiere of A Mirror by contemporary British playwright Sam Holcroft, audiences are handed what appears to be a wedding program celebrating the marriage of “Leyla and Joel” and instructed to choose their seats. A live musician (Matt Bassett) sets the ambiance with pleasant instrumental guitar.
Almost immediately, there are signals that something is off about this wedding. The wedding program includes an “oath of allegiance” to an unnamed Motherland. The venue, described by director and scenic designer Jason Tamborini as an art gallery, features a gray faux-brick wall covered with nondescript paintings, white gauze, and twin paper wedding bells hanging from the ceiling above a cheap-looking table and chairs. Combined with Emma E. Smith’s stark, sterile lighting, Tamborini’s set gives the impression of a pop-up wedding occurring in a doctor’s office. When Leyla, the bride (Lily Burka), enters wearing a white sleeveless top and a white-and-gold tweed pencil skirt (Lynly A. Saunders, costume designer), she looks more ready for her cubicle than her wedding.
Unsurprisingly (especially to those who have read anything about Holcroft’s play, or who flipped the “wedding program” over to reveal the coded message on its back side), the cast soon reveals that the wedding is a sham, and introduces themselves as actors staging a play in the nameless Motherland without permission from the Ministry of Culture.
In this play-within-a-play, Jordan Brown (who initially appears as “Joel,” the groom in the fake wedding) plays Adem Nariman, a combat veteran turned auto mechanic with the ability to remember conversations verbatim and the desire to turn these conversations into theater. Adem has submitted his first play, The Ninth Floor, a collection of scenes he has overheard in his apartment building, to the Ministry of Culture for approval, landing him in the office of Jan Čelik (Maboud Ebrahimzadeh), a high-ranking bureaucrat in the Ministry. The gritty realism, sexual content, and profanity in Adem’s script have alarmed the censors, yet Ebrahimzadeh’s Čelik, styling himself a protector and promoter of art, truth, and beauty amid what he calls the “propagandist hacks” at the Ministry, offers to help Adem “channel” his talent in ways more acceptable to the state. Čelik enlists his awkward young assistant Mei (Burka) and his old friend Bax (Shaan Sharma), one of the Motherland’s most renowned playwrights, in the effort.
As actors playing actors in a play about an aspiring playwright, an established playwright, and their interactions with the censors at the Ministry of Culture, Prologue’s cast leads the audience on an intricately layered metatheatrical journey through the nature of art and the function of storytelling within the power dynamics of a totalitarian state.
The fictional totalitarian state breaks through the fourth wall in several interruptions that punctuate the play-within-a-play, as the actors pause abruptly to investigate whether car horn sounds (Dan Deiter, sound designer) indicate police outside, warn the audience, and briefly resume the fictitious wedding.
These interruptions, intended to be immersive, don’t quite achieve a genuine sense of danger for Prologue’s audiences, seated in a performance space located in a former Taekwondo studio behind a CVS in a small commercial plaza in Arlington, with million-dollar homes within walking distance. Yet at the performance I attended, a quiet exchange between the characters in the play-within-a-play elicited audible emotion from the audience:
ČELIK: What about the story, did you like it?
MEI: Oh I knew it already, we learned that at school — the peasant uprising. So I knew what was going to happen.
ČELIK: Yes, okay, but we don’t go to see Romeo and Juliet expecting the lovers to stay alive at the end. We go for —
MEI: I’ve never seen Romeo and Juliet. It’s banned.
Holcroft’s play — inspired in part by a trip she took to North Korea in 2011 and her involvement in a writing workshop with Lebanese and Syrian writers in 2014 — premiered at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2023 before transferring to the West End in early 2024. It migrated across the pond in 2026 and was staged both in Toronto and in Portland, Oregon, prior to Prologue’s mounting it in DC, where audiences are all too aware that censorship does not need a Soviet-style Ministry of Culture to flourish.
Against the backdrop of President Donald Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center, replacing its board of directors with handpicked loyalists, his administration’s slashing of public funding for the arts, and his pressure on the Smithsonian to avoid “‘divisive narratives’ and tell an upbeat story [of] the country’s history and culture,” the questions raised by A Mirror about the stories we tell ourselves as individuals and as a country are timely and necessary. In a city where so many livelihoods depend on proximity to power and privilege, Ebrahimzadeh’s performance as bureaucrat Čelik — and the stories he tells himself to justify his role in systems of power and privilege — is especially worth watching.
Running Time: Approximately two hours and 15 minutes, including one intermission.
A Mirror plays through May 17, 2026, at Prologue Theatre, 6408 Williamsburg Blvd, Arlington, VA. Prologue performs in their rehearsal space behind CVS in the Williamsburg Plaza — see their helpful directions here. Performances are Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 7:30 PM and Sundays at 4:00 PM. Tickets are $50 and available online.
The program for A Mirror is online here.
A Mirror
By Sam Holcroft
CAST
Maboud Ebrahimzadeh: Čelik/Registrar/Real Adem
Jordan Brown: Adem/Groom/Hari
Lily Burka: Mei/Bride
Shaan Sharma: Bax/Best Man
Gary DuBreuil: Senior Officer/Real Čelik
Matt Bassett: the musician
Bayou Elom: U/S Čelik/Registrar
Chandler Jordan: Ensemble & Adem U/S
Mollie Greenberg James: Ensemble & Mei U/S
Matthew Sparacino: Ensemble & Bax U/S
Brian Grehoski: Petrov & Senior Officer U/S
DESIGN TEAM
Jason Tamborini: Director, Scenic Designer & Technical Director
Dan Deiter: Sound Designer
Lynly A. Saunders: Costume Designer
Emma E. Smith: Lighting Designer
Sierra Young: Fight & Intimacy Director
