The theme of this summer’s Lincoln Center Festival, which ran from 10 to 30 July 2017, was “transcending borders,” according to Nigel Redden, the festival director. I chose two of the festival offerings that reflect that idea strongly: While I Was Waiting, the first Syrian play in the LCF in its 22-season history, and To the End of the Land, an Israeli drama. I’ve often said that one of the absolute best things about living in New York City is that the arts of the entre works eventually make it here. While many world capitals get touring shows and exhibits from abroad, no city that I can think of gets them in the quantity and frequency from as many foreign theaters, concert halls, and studios. It’s almost an even bet that if it tours, it’ll get here sooner or later. On the theater scene, with the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival and the summer glut that’s the LCF, we get several score of plays from dozens of countries, represented by both large institutional theaters and small companies presenting both new works and classics. (There’s nothing quite like seeing a national classic performed by actors from that country, like a Chekhov from a Russian company or a Molière by a French troupe.) Add to these the individual tours of productions from overseas, and a year will bring close to a hundred theater performances of every description and conceivable form of stage art from which to choose. And that’s not even counting the musical, dance, and performance presentations from around the globe.
That said, I was very curious about While I Was Waiting because
I haven’t seen very much Arabic theater.
(One past experience was Speaker’s
Progress by Sulayman Al-Bassam, a Kuwaiti playwright and director, in a 2011 BAM Next Wave
Festival. See my report, posted on 27
October 2011.) In addition, I was
curious how a play from one of the banned countries would fare here now that
President Trump’s Muslim travel ban has taken limited effect. (I imagine most of the visas for While I
Was Waiting were secured before the Supreme Court’s partial lifting in June
of the injunction barring the ban’s enforcement. Nonetheless, according to an article by
theater reporter David Cote published by Lincoln Center, the process to secure
visas for members of the Waiting
company was labyrinthine and often fraught.)
Aside from its content, While I Was Waiting is interesting
from another perspective as well. Both
the writer, Mohammad Al Attar, and the director, Omar Abusaada, have formal
training from the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Damascus. I know there
are Arabic plays all over the Islamic world—Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006), the
1988 Nobel laureate in literature, was an Egyptian playwright, as well as a
novelist, poet, and screenwriter—but the only ones I’ve ever heard of or seen
have been modern plays. (My friend Helen
Kaye, who covers culture for the Jerusalem
Post—and has contributed often to Rick
On Theater—has written about some Arabic plays in Israel.) I didn’t
know whether the Arab world has a historical theater tradition. Africa doesn’t; neither do Native Americans.
Both those cultures are still trying to adapt Western theater practices
for their indigenous narrative forms and other performance traditions (music,
dance, and masking, among others). I wondered if Arab cultures are
in the same position.
It turns out, they are.
What we see as “theater,” meaning stage plays performed by actors, in
the Middle East is a Western import that dates no farther back than the late
19th or early 20th century in most countries of the Arabian Peninsula and North
Africa. Censorship and religious and
cultural taboos (such as women appearing on stage and religious and historical
icons impersonated by actors) had been one impediment to the development of an
indigenous theater; most early regional theater exposure came from traveling
European troupes. Indigenous companies
began imitating and adapting the stage fare introduced by the Western
companies. Local playwrights began
writing their own versions of Shakespeare and Molière, incorporating their own nations’
forms of performance such as storytelling and shadow puppetry. My minimal experience with Arab plays
suggests to me that theater artists in this region are still experimenting with
what is fundamentally a foreign art form, still looking for ways to make it
their own. This may account for some of
what I discerned in While I Was Waiting. (When I visited a museum in Istanbul dedicated to
Turkish modern art, I learned that the Ottoman Empire used to send nascent
indigenous artists to Paris for art training and they usually came back
imitating Western European techniques and styles to depict Turkish subjects and
themes. It has taken generations for
Turkish modern artists to begin to find a truly Turkish form of painting and
sculpture—and, to my eye, they still haven’t gotten very good at it. This may find its parallel in theater in the
Arab world.)
A co-production of Festival d’Avignon, Napoli Teatro
Festival, AFAC Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, Pôle Arts de la scène – Friche
La Belle de Mai (Marseille), Theater Spektakel (Zurich), Onassis Cultural
Centre (Athens), Vooruit (Ghent), La Bâtie Festival de Genève, Les Bancs
publics – Festival Les Rencontres à l’échelle (Marseille), and Festival d’Automne
à Paris, While I Was Waiting was written by Mohammad Al Attar
starting in 2015. Based on the story of
a friend of director Omar Abusaada, with whom Al Attar first collaborated in
2007, it was premièred at the Kunsten Festival in Brussels in May 2016. It won the ZKB (Züricher Kantonalbank) Patronage
Prize at the 2016 Züricher Theater Spektakel and was selected for the 70th
Festival d’Avignon in France in July 2016.
Before its run in New York City, While I Was Waiting was presented
in Athens and the French cities of Marseille and Lille. The North American première of the play
opened on 19 July 2017 at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College of
Criminal Justice, a component of the City University of New York, on West 59th
Street; it ran through the 22nd and I saw the 8 p.m. performance on Friday, 21
July.
Over its 22 seasons, the Lincoln Center Festival has
presented 1,465 performances of opera, music, dance, theater, and
interdisciplinary forms by internationally acclaimed artists from more than 50
countries. In that time, the festival has
commissioned 44 new works and offered 145 world, North American, U.S., and New
York premieres. It places particular
emphasis on showcasing contemporary artistic viewpoints and multidisciplinary
works that challenge the boundaries of traditional performance. This summer’s festival, celebrating 50 years
since Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts launched the first prototype for the
annual international festival, includes 20 international productions and 43
performances from 17 nations.
Since its opening in 1988, the Gerald W. Lynch Theater has
been a cultural resource for John Jay College and New York City. The theater’s dedicated to the creation and
presentation of performing arts programming of all disciplines with a special
focus on how art can illuminate the perception of justice in U.S. society. The Lynch Theater’s also a member of CUNY
Stages, a consortium of 16 performing arts centers located on City University
campuses across New York City. The theater’s
hosted events in the Lincoln Center Festival since the LCF’s first season in
1996, as well as presenting performances by the New York City Opera, Great
Performers at Lincoln Center, Gotham Chamber Opera, Metropolitan Opera Guild,
and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater/Ailey II. The theater’s also been the site of many
television and film specials including A&E’s Live by Request, Comedy
Central Presents and Premium Blend;
Robert Klein in Concert; and VH1’s Soundtrack Live.
Driving out of Damascus one day in 2015, in search of locations
for a documentary film, and after passing through one of the many
checkpoints that dot the city, Taim (Mohammad Alrefai), a tyro filmmaker in his
late 20’s, was pulled over on the road and beaten unconscious. He reappeared later at a hospital and now lies in a deep coma, which the playwright calls a “grey zone,” somewhere between life and death. No one knows
who the assailants were or why Taim was attacked. Was it political? Common thuggery? Drug related?
In the Damascus of 2015, it could be any of these. The incident
forces his family to confront painful realities and buried revelations. After surviving the murder of Taim’s father, and
the scandal it revealed, his mother, who gravitated to conservative Islam and
took to wearing traditional garb, and sister, who’d fled to Beirut years before
to escape her mother’s religiosity, seem incapable of facing his coma, “neither alive nor dead, this grey zone somewhere between hope and despair.” From his liminal state, the young man observes
from a platform overlooking the stage or wanders unseen among his family and
friends, as his mother, Amal (Hanan Chkir), and older sister, Nada (Nanda
Mohammad), who’s returned to Damascus for her brother, and, in Al Attar’s
words, “watches his family members and friends struggle with the idea of losing
him as well as a reality that is becoming fiercer every day.”
Together the characters tell us about the upheaval in their
everyday lives, and about the changes that have struck the Syrian capital, now
become strange and cruel. Taim’s joined
in his otherworldly commentary by his friend Omar (Mustafa Kur), tortured to
death—or perhaps only nearly—in 2014 in one of Bashar Al Assad’s prisons. (The waking characters don’t see or hear
these two—only we do.) As Taim’s family
comes and goes from his hospital bedside—which remains empty to the audience (though
the other characters still see Taim lying there) once Alrefai rises at the top
of the one-hour-and-forty-five-minute play—performed without intermission in
Arabic with English supertitles (translation by Lana Abdo and supertitles operated
by Tarek Hefny)—Taim’s also visited by his girlfriend, Salma (Reham Kassar) and
an older friend, Osama (Mohammad Alrashi), a kind of aging hippie (and would-be
songwriter who’s never finished a song) who seems to have been Taim’s hashish
connection. The play depicts how Taim’s
family and friends go on living while he hangs in his halfway state. As the play ends, the family circle is still
in turmoil, and Taim, still in the grey zone, is being brought home. And the country’s still in the throes of a
seemingly endless civil war. Taim’s
family must continue to wait for some resolution to his in-between state—just
as all Syrians must wait for some resolution of the state of the country.
What happens in the play is that on one level, there’s a
basically realistic plot of the family and friends coping with Taim’s coma and
managing their daily existences, with all the problems of a dysfunctional
family anywhere in the world, while the city and its infrastructure deteriorate
around them from the civil war. “You
tend to think about those people that you see through reports in the media as
characters, not as human beings,” Al Attar says, adding that “by trying to
focus on one family you see that Syrians are much closer to you than you
think.” In fact, the play’s not unlike a
soap opera, with the bickering, teasing, fighting, and scolding, except the
performances are more convincing.
On another level, the comatose Taim and Omar comment on what’s
happening and make observations. “How
can nothing have changed after all that happened?” asks Omar, referring to the
fact that hundreds of thousands of Syrians have died in the six years of civil
war, yet the dictatorial regime is still in place. Abusaada declares, “I think [Taim] can see,
listen and feel what is happening—but he can’t react to what’s happening around
[him]”; he and Omar can’t affect anything going on in the waking world, just as
many Syrians can see what’s happening in the country, but can’t do anything
about it. Playwright Al Attar explains:
While I Was Waiting is an attempt to tell the story of a people who
are still trying to survive—the story behind the images on screens and in
newspapers and beyond the complex political analysis, all of which often ignore
the fate of ordinary humans and the deep transformations happening in their
lives, thoughts, and beliefs. This story
of a middle-class family is similar to many families in Damascus and Syria in
general. Its members are trying to
survive during a time of violence, war, and social change. In this quest, they
greatly transform as individuals; some decide to engage in long-deferred
confrontations while others are content to observe.
The play, like Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (whose French title means “While Waiting
for Godot”), takes place while the characters await some kind of
resolution and the action is what they do while waiting.
The realistic plot works perfectly well. Bissane Al Charif’s set’s fragmentary, but
everything else in this aspect of While I Was Waiting is pretty
much Realism. The stark lighting was
designed by Abdulhameed Khaleifa—though because of President Trump’s
now-effective travel ban against Syrians, he was denied a visa and the design
was executed at the Lynch by “Lighting Interpreter” Zakaria Al-Alami. This aspect of the play can be very wrenching
emotionally with the Assad dictatorship and the civil war as a backdrop. The cast to an actor was clearly so committed
to this play and its context that it would be easy to imagine I wasn’t watching
skilled actors creating characters, but the characters themselves participating
in a psychodrama.
The ethereal level doesn’t work as well for me—it’s not
fully realized, I think (in terms of presentational style, for instance) and
there are multi-media elements (Taim’s videos, created by Reem Al Ghazzi, and
music and sound by wannabe-DJ Omar, designed by Samer Saem Eldahr, also known
as electronic music artist Hello
Psychaleppo—who also contributed the original music, a sort of Middle Eastern rock
sound, for the show) that aren’t thoroughly developed or integrated. From the physical and vocal portrayals—since
I couldn’t understand the Arabic dialogue—there were times I felt that both Alrefai
and Kur were uncomfortable with these scenes, and when Taim’s consciousness was
walking among his waking family and friends, he seemed like he thought he was
somewhere he shouldn’t be and was afraid he’d be “discovered.”
Then there’s yet another dimension to the play. Taim
is also “a thinly veiled metaphor” for Syria, which the playwright also
sees as existing in a “grey zone.” For Abusaada, the “state between life
and death represented the limbo that is war.” Al Attar sees a parallel
between the situations of the comatose Taim, who, with his friend Omar, had
been enthusiastic participants in the 2011 uprising, born of the hopeful Arab
Spring, against the Al Assad dictatorship, and that of Syria as a nation; he
explains that
the situation in Syria was
becoming increasingly complex and was worsening. The regime’s excessive violence against
protesters transformed the peaceful revolution against the most brutal
dictatorship in the region into a fierce war, which soon turned into a proxy
war waged at an international and regional level without involving the Syrians.
In this horrible picture there are still
Syrians in the country or in the diaspora who are trying to resist death and
displacement. Their resistance, in its
most instinctive form, lies in their insistence on surviving and in their
refusal to give up the dream of positive change; they refuse to choose between
Assad’s military fascism that has ruled the country for half a century and the
religious fascism represented by ISIS and the like.
Both Taim and Omar, who’d even gone so far as to join the jihadist
Al Nusra Front, became disaffected when they began to see that the tactics of
the resistance were as vile as those of the regime.
This parallel isn’t explicit in the script—Al Attar explains
it in a program note and the concept appears in most of the press and program
coverage for the production—and it’s supposed to be subliminal. Al Attar explains that
in our continuous attempts to
understand the changes in Syria through theater, the story of the coma seemed
to be the most appropriate framework for comprehending our absurd conditions. Throughout the coma, reality’s cruelty and
roughness can merge with our dreams and imaginings, which are our only escape
from the harsh reality. The coma also
seemed to be an entry point from which to think about the tens of thousands of
Syrians who forcibly disappeared or were imprisoned or whose bodies lay
somewhere without graves.
I’m not sure this works, either, since I doubt viewers
would get it without the note. (I try to imagine Syrians seeing this play
and I wonder if they’d get this concept when we Westerners wouldn’t without
help. I have a feeling they’d need to be told, too.) But even though
it doesn’t really work on its own, I find the idea praiseworthy because it
raises the play’s impact a notch or two.
It’s clear that Taim’s circle stands in for ordinary Syrians, those who
try to lead regular lives and are unaffiliated with Assad, ISIS and the
jihadists, or even the Free Syrian Army, and that’s pretty compelling; but
making the play speak for the country as a whole would be powerful. The metaphor is worth working on to see if
there are ways to make it clearer without actually spelling it out in the text.
I don’t know if it would ever be possible, but I like the attempt.
The idea for what became While I Was Waiting came
to director Abusaada two years ago when he heard about a close friend who went
through an ordeal identical to Taim’s and died after spending two months in a
coma. He visited the friend and met
other people who had gone through similar experiences and then took his
material to Al Attar who penned the play that he says is “a way of thinking of
all those who are not with us and whose fates are unknown, of their mothers, of
all who are in doubt, which is one of the biggest tragedies facing the Syrian
people today.” On several visits to
Syrian hospitals, Abusaada met doctors as well as families facing the tragedy
of a loved one’s coma. He recorded their
stories in order to understand the mysteries of this strange state and the ways
in which the families and friends handled the pain of this “omnipresence of
absence.” From these strains, Abusaada
and Al Attar conjured this tale that weaves together different levels of
consciousness and the symbolic image of their homeland.
They also see the play as a reflection of their dreams for a
Syrian political theater “whose values failed to become real when it was still
possible.” Theater, Abusaada asserts, “could
be a tool of resistance.” Says Al Attar:
“For Syrians such as Omar Abusaada and myself, theater is our way to cling to
hope and to resist despair. This has
given us a renewed impetus to reflect on the meaning of theater today.” The playwright continues: “The more our
reality deteriorates and the scenes in Syria become increasingly violent and
bloody, the more we need to know about the conditions of ordinary people hiding
behind the images transmitted to our television screens.”
Mohammad Al Attar, 36, a dramaturg as well as a playwright, was
born in Damascus. He graduated with a
degree in English literature from Damascus University in 2002 and a degree in
Theatrical Studies from the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Damascus in
2007. He also received a master’s degree
in Applied Drama (with special focus on the political and social role of
theater) from Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, in 2010. His theatrical works—which include Withdrawal, Samah, an improvisational work with a group of boys in a reform
school; Online; Look at the Streets . . . This Is What Hope Looks Like; Could You Please Look into the Camera?; A Chance Encounter; Intimacy; and Antigone of
Shatila, a contemporary adaptation of Sophocles’ play reset in the
Lebanese refugee camp—have been performed in Damascus, London, New York, Seoul,
Berlin, Brussels, Edinburgh, Tunis, Athens, Marseilles, and Beirut. He’s written for numerous magazines and
newspapers, with a special focus on the Syrian uprising. Along with his writings for the stage, he uses
theater in special projects with marginalized groups across the Arab world,
including children from a depressed area on the outskirts of the old city of Tunis
and women in the refugee camps outside Beirut.
Omar Abusaada, a 40-year-old director and playwright also
from Damascus, started working as a dramaturg after finishing his theatrical
studies at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Damascus. He then moved into directing and cofounded
the Studio Theater in Damascus and in 2004 directed his first theatrical work, Insomnia. He directed the première of While I Was Waiting at the Kunsten
Festival and at the 70th edition of Festival d’Avignon and had previously collaborated
with Al Attar on Samah, Look at the Streets . . . This Is What Hope
Looks Like, Antigone of Shatila, Could You Please Look into the Camera?, and
Intimacy. He’s also directed Al Affich; Almirwad Wa
Almikhala; and Syrian Trojan Women.
He’s introduced into Syria different
ideas of contemporary writing and documentary, and the practices of Augusto
Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, and has worked for years in remote villages
and local communities in Syria, Egypt, and Yemen. Abusaada also leads workshops in contemporary
theater writing and directing.
There is another character in While I Was Waiting:
the ancient city of Damascus. Both
playwright Al Attar and director Abusaada were born and grew up there, as did
most of the cast. But while Abusaada
splits his time between his native city and Berlin, Al Attar left Damascus “against
my will” in 2012 and eventually settled in the German capital, where he now
lives and works. Many of the cast and
production staff of While I Was Waiting are expatriate Damascenes
and, of course, the play can’t be performed in Syria because of its implied and
stated political and social commentary; Al Attar vows he “cannot return as long
as the Assad regime is in power,” even though all the rest of his family
remains in Damascus. “[T]he city still
lives within me wherever I go,” affirms the playwright. Even Abusaada, though he insists on remaining
a resident of Damascus, can no longer work in Syria “since my work has this
political interest. I cannot really work
in a free way. Even everyday life is
really hard, in terms of electricity, heating, transportation.”
For Al Attar and Abusaada, the city itself is significant to
the play. The playwright insists that While
I Was Waiting
is also the story of the city of
Damascus, whose center has remained under horrific security control by the
regime while overwhelming bombardment and siege take place on its outskirts. The city has witnessed countless wars,
invasions, and fires throughout its history and is currently witnessing new
seasons of violent change. It’s the city
in which I was born and grew up, without ever feeling that I understood it
well.
“The images of Damascus have been present in my long
discussions with Omar and in our tireless attempts to understand its
transformations and the future that awaits it,” Al Attar declares. Much is made of Nada’s choice to leave the
city for a life in Beirut, and in the last scenes of the play, while Nada seems
to have decided to resettle in Damascus and live in her brother’s apartment while
she tries to get his film produced, Taim’s girlfriend considers leaving their
home city for Turkey. Taim’s film was
going to be a history of the city told through his family, for which purpose
he’d been collecting old family photos and letters. Scenes from his documentary, projected on the
scrim that makes up a wall in the upper level of his and Omar’s platform, are
all shots of Damascus in turmoil.
In sum, While I
Was Waiting is a fascinating play. As I indicated, I feel that it didn’t entirely work, but the
idea’s interesting. I surveyed four
reviews of the Lincoln Center presentation.
(Critical coverage of Lincoln Center Festival performances is somewhat
haphazard and curtailed because of their often limited readership appeal and
the briefness of their runs. Show-Score
didn’t cover While I Was Waiting or the other Lincoln Center
Festival show I attended, so there are no ratings calculations to report.)
In the U.S. edition of the Financial Times, Max McGuinness, calling While I Was Waiting a
“subtle and devastating new work,” observed that the “juxtaposition of everyday
human frailty and world-historical catastrophe sits at the heart of While
I Was Waiting.” Reports McGuinness: “Sectarian conflict may
be raging all around, but the focus of Attar’s superbly acted six-hander is on
how one ordinary, middle-class family and their friends struggle to keep going
amid the chaos.” Noting that “war here
entails long stretches of tedium punctuated by blistering moments of violence,”
the FT reviewer deemed, “It is a testament to Attar and director Omar
Abusaada’s sense of theatrical restraint that the latter are never depicted on
stage, save for the sound of distant gunshots caught on video.” The play’s focus, McGuinness wrote, is Taim’s
empty hospital bed, “a fitting metonym for the invisibility of the conflict’s
victims.” The review-writer’s final
assessment was that “the play itself, which is rich in gallows humour and
devoid of sentimentality, refuses to offer any tidy political or indeed
dramatic resolution. The war and life
just go on.”
The New York Times’ Jesse Green dubbed While I Was Waiting “a
subtly harrowing play,” reporting that it “gets around the [‘hectoring and
grandiosity’ of political plays] by embracing failure as its central subject:
the failure of government, yes, but also of resistance.” Syria’s “sense of stasis despite enormous
disruption”—the continuing civil violence that doesn’t seem to change
anything—“is what gives Mr. Al Attar’s play its convincing bite,” found
Green. The tension between the
ordinariness of the waking characters and the grim situation of Taim, “along
with some astonishing visual images that arise from it, keeps ‘While I Was
Waiting’ on a narrow course between horror and banality.” After praising a “wonderful” moment in which
Omar blows soap bubbles down on Salma, Green caviled that he “was not always
convinced that such moments of beauty did justice to the horror of the
situation,” but conceded that “that may be the point.” The Timesman asserted
that the play asks “whether we have a moral obligation to live in danger if we
can escape it, or whether our obligation is rather the opposite.” He offered, however, “Living in the gray zone
does not seem to be an answer.” In his
concluding judgment, Green averred, “Taim seems to have succumbed to an
ideology of hopelessness that Mr. Al Attar and the company of his play have
survived,” referring to the sometimes perilous decisions of company members
about where they live and what they do. “In doing so, they have given new life to the
idea of political theater by showing us how it may look a lot like domestic
drama, as seen from above.”
“When one’s entire life is spent waiting, how does one
measure the time?” asked Alia Malek in the New Yorker. This is what While
I Was Waiting depicts as Al Attar, Abusaada, and the actors “bring
this reality to a New York stage, capturing dynamics rarely explored by
non-Syrians.” Malek, who’s a Syrian and
a Damascene herself, acknowledged that the play “forces us to remember the
country’s Taims and Omars . . . but it is also an indictment of the living.” She added that “people living under
authoritarian regimes are the victims of those who rule them; they also,
however, become bystanders to brutality. In Syria, we are complicit even if not
directly to blame.” Like the characters in the play, Malek felt
the draw of the city for its natives: “home is home.” Like Nada and Salma, “nearly six million
Syrians have fled the country”; even, we learn at the end, Taim had planned to
flee his homeland and native city.
On the Huffington
Post, David Finkle asserted that While I Was Waiting “demands
immediate attention” because it’s rare for New York City to play “host to a
Syrian playwright and a Syrian director commenting on conditions in their
war-afflicted country,” especially when that country is so much in the
headlines in the United States. Finkle
pronounced While I Was Waiting “a sturdy play that gets at the
macrocosmic breadth of a horrifying situation . . . by going extremely
microcosmic and thereby earning the attention accorded it.” The HP reviewer, it seems, had problems
accepting Taim’s ability to witness, while in his comatose state, occurrences
not just in his hospital room, but elsewhere in the city. “But perhaps that . . . is just a reviewer
being too literal,” the journalist offered. (Ya think?) Finkle also noted that “the family bouts are
surprisingly out of the ordinary” and complained that they “don’t lift the
drama to an impressively higher dramaturgical level.” He concluded that “While I Was Waiting reaches
no easy conclusions. How could it?”
Finkle asked, pointing out, “In reflecting the uncertainty suggested in the
title, it acquires the poignancy shared by a group of people who love their
country but remain adrift amid its tragic upheaval. Al Attar keeps this element present right up
to the final, heartbreaking fade-out.”
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