Creation of artistic works is a way of promoting and regenerating religious values. Painting, music, theater, poetry and architecture are among the arts that engages the religious people with themselves. Iranian intellectuals and writers have been always interested in the stories of life, death and martyrdom of religious personalities. The playwrights of our country were not neglectful of these subjects and pay attention to the subjects that related to the religious personalities in some of their works. In this research we tried to investigate the manner of personification of religious personalities including prophets, Imams and their close followers in the Persian plays and identify the strengths and weaknesses in these works. An important point is that regarding the impossibility of showing the face of religious personalities specially the Shiite Imams in those plays that differ greatly from passion plays and try to keep the characteristics of a drama, how these plays could demonstrate the different faces of religious personalities in a dramatic way? Is the drama the suitable shape for recreating a religious personality?
For answering these and other related questions, we study ten religious plays that have been published after the Islamic revolution. In an overview of theory, we discuss about the characteristics of personality, types of personality and the appearance of the personalities in the plays. Then, a summary of available research works and thesis about the personality in the dramatic plays is studied that reveals many methodological and theoretical shortcomings in these works.
In this research, the following plays are studied: The Joseph of Canaan, the red hands, the promised sound of foots, the bridge, the aboozar of the bodies, Mecca in blood, maritime, Moslem son of agheel and the composing of Mokhtar. For this purpose a summary of the play has been discussed at first. Then, the personalities in the play were introduces and their interactions with other characters have been studied. In these plays the religious personalities are considered in different shapes: static, dynamic, axial, secondary, simple and complex. However, as these personalities are familiar to the average reader, no sufficient effort has been made to investigate the social dimensions of their characters.