Kalat Claimed

"Let women bring into this world children filled with loathing for war. The world is ruined by heroes. It is for us to reclaim it."
Kalat Claimed is a play by prominent screenwriter and director, Bahram Beyzaie.
It is a story of two generals in the Mongol conquest of Khwarazm (Chorasmia) and their dispute over the accession of Kalat (located in the Northwest of modern Iran). The City is ruled by Tui Khan who holds a grudge against his fellow general Togai Khan over the number of slain enemies. Tui Khan invites Togai Khan to a feast to reconcile, but each plots to kill the other. Togai attempts to capture Tui, but he manages to flee. Tui Khan's wife, Ay Banou, gathers an army with her husband's remaining soldiers and conquers the City with both of the generals dead.

Bahram Beyzaie is an award-winning Iranian filmmaker, theater director, playwright, educator, and scholar of the history of Iranian theater. He was one of the leaders of the generation of filmmakers known as the Iranian New Wave, beginning in the late 1960s, and helped revitalize Iran's performing arts by incorporating Indo-Iranian mythology and Iranian conventional performing arts with modern theater and cinema. Over the past 50 years, Beyzaie has written numerous papers and published more than 70 books, monographs, plays, and screenplays. He has directed 14 staged plays, ten feature films, and four short films. Beyzaie was the head of the Theater Arts Department at the University of Tehran for many years. His comprehensive book Theatre in Iran (1965) is considered an authoritative account of Iranian theater history. Since Beyzaie's arrival at Stanford University in 2010 as the Bita Daryabari Lecturer of Persian Studies, he has staged several plays and held workshops on Iranian mythology and cinema. He currently teaches courses on Iranian theater and cinema at Stanford.