A new artistic look to human isolation in times of the COVID-19 pandemic is staged by the Italian Embassy in Tehran in its new production of the theater episode, ‘Alone’.

‘Alone’ is the title of the fifth episode of the series ‘8 ½ Theater Clips: How COVID-19 Changed Our Lives,’ a virtual production by the embassy in cooperation with the Italian theater company ‘Instability Vaganti’ and the Iranian company ‘Don Quixote’.

The episode, directed by Anna Dorno in collaboration with Ali Shams and performed by Nicola Pianzola and Danial Kheirikhah on the musical notes by Riccardo Nanni, describes the absence of social interaction during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a press release on the embassy’s website.

The narrating voices in Farsi by Danial Kheirikhah and in Italian by Nicola Pianzola describe a “new normal” made of closed theaters and lonely performers. The powerful images of Kheirikhah looking for lost handshakes and hugs and of a confused Pianzola while standing on an empty stage without spectators in a Northern Italian small-town theater, deliver a feeling of loneliness, emptiness and distance.

The theater series, which was premiered on Wednesday, is based on an original theme by the Italian Embassy in Tehran and ‘Instabili Vaganti’.

‘Alone,’ as well as the previous episodes, ‘Don’t Call Me a Hero,’ ‘Notes of Absence,’ ‘The Night Shift’ and ‘Beyond the Mirror,’ can be watched on YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram channels of the Italian Embassy in Tehran.