Marjan Neshat gets her seat at the table

By Brian Braiker

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Marjan Neshat is about to have an especially busy season.

An Iranian-born actor with credits that include the movies “Sex and the City 2,” “Alfie,” “RoboCop” and a recurring role on the ABC series “Quantico” among others, Neshat will be appearing in three plays Off Broadway, one right after the other.

First up is “Selling Kabul,” which opens for previews on November 17 at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater and charts the human cost of the U.S. military involvement in (and withdrawal from) Afghanistan. “I don’t think I’ve ever done a play that has been as necessary in the sense that now I feel like Afghanistan is in the human psyche in a totally different way,” says Neshat, who is this week’s guest on “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast.”

“These are incredibly good people in impossible circumstances. Sometimes, living in America, we can distance [ourselves],” she says. “I would like [the audience] to look at these people and go, ‘That could be my brother or my sister’ … And the impossible situation that they’re in is not removed from our country’s decisions.”

Nershat herself is a child of the revolution: She was just 4 when the Shah fled Iran. Her parents pulled her and her sister out a few years later, in 1985, after a number of incidents threatened not only their freedom but their safety. She recalls a time when a van pulled up to the two unchaperoned siblings and armed guards chastised her sister because the top button of her coat was undone.

Neshat will be able to draw from those experiences in one of the other plays she’s set to appear in: In “Wish You Were Here,” she plays Nazanin, who along with her friends is preparing for a wedding while the Iranian revolution is brewing outside. The third play is “English.” All three were written by Middle Eastern playwrights.

The influx of this new work is reflective of a growing inclusivity in her field, she says, and a broader spectrum of stories people are willing to tell. Whereas before she felt frequently typecast, the roles are getting better, less two-dimensional.

“I feel like things are opening where people are asked to come to the table,” she says in regards to casting opportunities these days. When she was starting out, she says, “casting directors would say to me, ‘Oh you’re so good, but I have to save you . Like, if we’re doing a thing about a family, it’s like, ‘yes you are wild or you have romance or you have this. But also you can be a crying Muslim, so we’ll make you be a crying Muslim’.”

Neshat, who lives in Prospect Heights, unpacks her lonely childhood, finding solace in acting and finally putting roots down in New York.

Check out this episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” for more. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts.