A major turning point in Nasirian’s life occurred in 1953 when he met Shahin Sarkisian, an Armenian-Iranian director and playwright, through his classmate Fahimeh Rastkar. Sarkisian, who had studied in Europe, brought modernist and psychological methods of acting to Iran. His influence on Nasirian was transformative. Sarkisian encouraged him to see theater not merely as entertainment but as a moral and social instrument—a mirror reflecting the complexities of human behavior and society.
Under Sarkisian’s mentorship, Nasirian began to explore playwriting, focusing on the conflicts between tradition and modernity, authenticity and hypocrisy—recurring themes that would define much of his later work. From the mid-1950s onward, he emerged as one of the founding members of the National Art Group (Goruh-e Honar-e Melli), alongside Ezzatollah Entezami, Jafar Vali, Rokn al-Din Khosravi, and Abbas Javanmard. This group became the nucleus of Iran’s first generation of professional theater artists, committed to creating a distinctively Iranian form of modern drama.
