The seemingly disparate national traditions of American and Iranian art is conjoined in the Iranian adaptation of American dramatists. This paper is basically focusing on the American playwrights who has been popular among the Iranian elite since 1950s and their burgeoning fame on stage is indebted to the transcultural appropriation of Method Acting in Iranian Actor’s Academy. The reputation of American dramatists in Iran is tightly liked to two Hollywood and one CBS adaptations and three actors: Marlon Brando in Streetcar Named Desire (Dir. Kazan, 1951), Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Dir. Brooks, 1958) and Dustin Hoffman in Death of a Salesman (Dir. Schlöndorff, 1985). The version of Williams’s and Miller’s Americanness reflecting the late 1940s and 1950s, took almost 60 years to be seen on Iranian screen, albeit altered. The Americanness, and the omnipresence of Hollywood that caused the very fame of these plays in Iran is now diverted to class struggle (Streetcar Named Desire in 2014), and sexuality and taboos (Death of a Salesman in 2016). The time of the Iranian adaptations is post 9/11 era when American Islamophobia meets with Iranian anti-colonialism of the government. Though media and politics are closely linked, it seems that despite the cold or even hostile relationship between the two countries represented in the political media, Iranians adaptation of American literature is popular and Iranian movies win American prizes (i.e. Academy Award for the adaptation of Death of a Salesman as Salesman [Dir. Farhadi. 2016]). What we see on screen is neither the American play nor an Iranian movie but a new space is created: tansnational art. However, the transnational is not understood in equal terms in the sense that Iranian literature is not adapted by Hollywood and Iranian artist are much motivated to adapt American literature rather than Iranian one. The paper aims to probe into this challenging side of transnational adaptation in a Muslim county, Iran, during the rise of Islamophobia.

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