Tomato soup cans. Coca-Cola bottles. Neon-bright portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Mao Zedong and Richard Nixon. In a career spanning the early 1950s through his death in 1987, artist Andy Warhol made the mundane iconic and the iconic surreal.
But it wasn’t Warhol’s celebrated pop-art images that intrigued Maine-based playwright Brent Askari. It was instead Warhol’s affinity for dictators — specifically the artist’s 1976 visit to Tehran as the guest of the late Shah Reza Pahlavi, an authoritarian ruler who imprisoned and tortured critics of his regime.
