Hamid Amjad’s play, The Thirteenth Night (Shab-e Sizdahom), constitutes a modern reinterpretation of traditional and historical Iranian contexts. Beyond serving as a historical comedy-drama, the work possesses significant potential for analyzing power dynamics and politics within its performative structure. By explicating the "aesthetic regime" of art and challenging the representative order and the Aristotelian structure of signification, the play questions the constructedness and instability inherent in both art and politics. The central problem of this research addresses how "the political" is reflected not merely through content and themes, but within the work's aesthetic structure and form.

The objective of the present study is to analyze the mechanisms of "disruption" and the "redistribution of the sensible" in this play, based on Jacques Rancière's theory of the "aesthetic regime." This research has been conducted using a descriptive-analytical method, relying on library resources. In this regard, Ranciere's key concepts, including the "police order" and the "distribution of the sensible," were first extracted and subsequently employed as the theoretical framework to investigate dramatic actions—such as gender cross-dressing and the play-within-a-play technique—within the text.

Research findings indicate that Amjad, by utilizing the device of "cross-dressing," blurs the established socio-political gender and class boundaries of the Qajar era (the police order). Furthermore, through the "play-within-a-play" technique, he shatters the illusion of representing reality; by entering forbidden spaces, the characters create a disruption within the representative space of the drama. These devices are not merely tools for comedy; rather, they are political acts that, by disrupting the hierarchy of seeing and hearing, facilitate the emergence of new subjects (such as women and the subaltern) based on aesthetic theory. This leads to a reconfiguration of the sensible within the world of the drama, thereby making the audience aware of the constructed nature of the representative system. This study descriptively and analytically positions The Thirteenth Night within the framework of Rancière’s aesthetic logic, demonstrating how Amjad, through a rupture in the socio-political space of a historical period, addresses the reconfiguration of the sensible and the practice of politics regarding characters and identities in art.