The Theater of Sa’dallah Wannous

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“The Theater of Sa’dallah Wannous,” is a collaboration that constitutes the culmination of fifteen years of scholarly, artistic, literary, and theatrical projects and research related to the renowned Syrian playwright Sa’dallah Wannous. This event, organized by Robert Myers (PhD, Yale 1995), Professor of English and former Director of CASAR at the American University of Beirut (AUB) with Nada Saab (PhD, Yale 2003), Associate Professor of Humanities at Lebanese American University (LAU), will be comprised of dramatic readings from their English-language translations of five of Wannous’s most celebrated plays. The readings will be analyzed by panels of theater artists, journalists, and scholars from various academic fields from North America and the Arab region assessing the significance of Wannous’s life and work from a range of perspectives. The conference builds on the translations and scholarly research on Wannous and contemporary political theater from the Arab region by Myers and Saab in Modern and Contemporary Political Theater from the Levant (Brill, 2019), The Theatre of Sa’dallah Wannous: Syrian Playwright and Public Intellectual (Cambridge UP, 2021), and Sentence to Hope: A Sa’dallah Wannous Reader (Yale UP, 2019). This latter volume received the prestigious Sheikh Hamad Translation Award (First Prize, 2019), was selected the #1 book of translation of Arabic literature by Al Jazeera in 2019, and received a glowing review in The New York Review of Books. In Beirut, Saab and Myers worked with Lebanese theater director Sahar Assaf, currently director of Golden Thread Theater in San Francisco and consultant to the Ministry of Culture in Saudi Arabia, to stage Wannous’s most renowned work, Rituals of Signs and Transformations, in a co-production with Silk Road Rising in Chicago and AUB, which was supported by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation and reviewed in The Boston Globe. They also collaborated on the staging at LAU’s Irwin Theater in Beirut of The Rape, one of Wannous’s most controversial works, which dramatizes the use of rape as a tool of interrogation by the Shin Bet in the West Bank during the first Intifada.

During the past fifteen years there have also been staged readings of many of the organizers’ translations of Wannous, at CUNY’s Segal Theater Center, McGill, Cornell, Silk Road Rising in Chicago, The Lab at Georgetown, LAU in New York, and in Beirut. There continues to be considerable interest in Wannous around the world among artists and scholars in works like Suzanne Kassab’s Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (Columbia UP, 2010), Edward Ziter’s Political Performance in Syria: From the Six-Day War to the Syrian Uprising (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and the Oman Digital Library Exhibition on the Work of Sa’dallah Wannous (Middle East Institute, 2022).

Participants in the two-day event at Yale will include celebrated Arab and North American theater artists and scholars such as Nidal Al-Achkar, Nada Saab, Sahar Assaf, Mona Knio and Islam Balbaa, as well as theater scholars such as Marvin Carlson and Edward Ziter, historians such as James Reilly, and celebrated journalists such as Rami Khouri. The event will feature analysis of and scenes from five Wannous plays, including Saab and Myers’s recently completed translation of Wannous’s monumental 1994 play Historical Miniatures. That play’s subjects include the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, historiography, Tamurlane, the sack of Damascus, Eastern miniature painting and the perils of a disinterested intellectual approach in the face of dictatorial force. CMES and Yale have previously had two highly successful collaborations with Robert Myers and AUB: the presentation of his play Mesopotamia, about Gertrude Bell, in 2012 along with an exhibition of her letters and photography at the Whitney Humanities Center when he was the Franke Visiting Scholar/Artist, and the workshop production in 2022 of his play A Thousand Strange Places: Anthony Shadid and the Middle East, about the renowned Lebanese-American journalist and author who died in Syria in 2012. Like those two events, “The Theater of Sa’dallah Wannous” will provide an opportunity to bring together audiences from various disciplines at Yale in addition to members of the public interested in innovative performance and engaging dramatic stories about modern Syria and the Arab world. As the recent end of five decades of dictatorship by the Assad family in Syria makes clear, it is vital that forums like CMES and CASAR provide North American audiences with the historical context and multi-dimensional perspectives offered by Wannous’s works in tandem with scholars who study theater, culture, art history and the history of Middle East.

Background

The Syrian dramatist Sa’d allah Wannous (1941–1997) is widely acknowledged to be one of the most significant writers and public intellectuals from the Arab world in the twentieth century. Known principally as a dramatist, he is the author of over a dozen of the most important plays from Syria and the Middle East written between 1960 and 2000. Like the works of Bertolt Brecht, who was one of his early models, Wannous’s plays combine a range of innovative theatrical forms including traditional Arabic storytelling and performance modes with singular styles of dialogue that alternate between absurdist humor, erudite poetic forms, and scathing critiques of Arab societies and the cruel, inept regimes that have disfigured them. Although Wannous’s plays are all set in the Arab world, they are stylistically and intellectually informed by a cosmopolitan global perspective that employs various contemporary theatrical, artistic, and philosophical modes including surrealism, the theater of the absurd, existentialism, Marxism and théâtre engagé.

Wannous, who was born in a village near the Syrian port of Tartous, moved to Cairo in the late 1950s to study journalism after completing his early studies in Syria. At that time, Cairo was the cultural capital of the Arab world, and Egypt was under the leadership of the charismatic leader Gamel Abdel Nasser, who had led a coup in July 1952 to overthrow the corrupt King Farouq. Nasser became the principal icon of Arab nationalism, mobilizing intellectuals and the masses alike after facing down the British, French, and Israelis, who tried to seize control of the Suez Canal in 1956. The period instilled in Wannous an admiration for Nasser and a devotion to the pan-Arabist vision he embodied. Wannous’s political consciousness was accompanied by a budding interest in theater, which he cultivated through avid readings of American and European plays and critical literature about theater.

Wannous’s first plays, written in the early 1960s, were primarily philosophical and allegorical pieces strongly influenced by Beckett, Sartre, Tawfik al-Hakim, and Kafka, and were meant more for the page than the stage. However, when Arab nationalism abruptly collapsed with the devastating defeat of Arab forces in the Six-Day War of 1967 and the de facto annexation of all historical Palestine, the Golan, and the Sinai Peninsula, Wannous immediately began to write pointedly political plays with the explicit intention of provoking opposition to what he viewed as corrupt and mendacious Arab governments. Instead of becoming disillusioned by these Arab dictatorships or the failures of Arab nationalism, Wannous used theater as a tool to try to transform Arab societies. He not only developed explicit theories for the creation of what he termed a “theater of politicization,” he also created plays in which he experimented with new forms of theater that utilized traditional performance elements from the Arab world in conjunction with a range of techniques from the European avant-garde, especially Brecht’s “epic theater.”

In 1967, Wannous was in Paris studying theater at the Sorbonne under the guidance of Jean-Marie Serrault, meeting a range of artists from France and the global south, and attending a wide variety of local and international productions, when news of the naksah (setback), the Arab defeat by Israel, arrived. He traveled briefly to Syria before returning to Paris, which was shaken soon after by student riots and mass strikes known as the “May events,” in which participants demanded university reform and increased civil and workers’ rights. Wannous, who was disillusioned by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s support of Israel, participated in this profound social upheaval and sought to bring the Palestinian question to the attention of the French through speeches and the distribution of leaflets.

Shortly after, Wannous wrote one of his most innovative plays, An Evening’s Entertainment For the Fifth of June, (the bitterly ironic title refers to the date of the Arabs’ colossal defeat in the 1967 War), a work that was heavily influenced by the political theater of Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht. As Frederike Pannewick asserts, Wannous “bravely and provocatively formulated the lineaments of a ‘politicizing’ aesthetic which was to make Arab theater into a vehicle of hope, instigating political reforms and speeding the processes of democratization: ‘We perform theater to develop and change consciousness. We want to deepen the grasp of our collective consciousness for our shared historical consciousness.’ Wannous's critical rereading of Arab history was thus imbued from the outset with the dynamics of social and political crises and a seemingly inexorable decline.” Nevertheless, in the 1970s Wannous went on to write several plays that were as formally inventive as any literature being produced in the Arab theater—and, one could argue, in world theater—that also embodied his project of politicization through didacticism and societal transformation. These works include The Adventure of the Head of Mamlouk Jaber, The King is the King and The King’s Elephant. This fruitful period came to an abrupt halt in 1977 when Wannous, who suffered from depression, attempted suicide in the wake of Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem, which he perceived as a betrayal. He did not write any plays for more than a decade.

The latter phase of Wannous’s career, which was even more prolific than the period from 1967 to 1977, saw a marked reassessment of his artistic and intellectual project, in particular his belief in theater as an instrument for societal and political revolution. In the aftermath of his political disillusionment, depression and a diagnosis in the late 1980s of terminal cancer, he came to the conclusion that theater could not instigate revolution or instant political change. He expressed the belief that theater should rather be seen as a vital element in a more broadly construed movement of enlightenment that, in the Arab world, necessarily drew on the ideas of the principal thinkers of the nahda, or renaissance, that occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In lieu of corrupt regimes per se, his nemesis now became theological thinking, which was based exclusively on faith and inculcated through worn-out ideas learned by rote. During this second phase of his career, his theater focused on a modernist project concerned with uprooting ossified religious teachings and replacing them with critical historical thinking, freedom of expression and innovation in the arts and all aspects of life. His theater, as he explicitly admitted, shifted from a programmatic Marxism that viewed people principally as historical actors to a preoccupation with people as individuals in a dialectical relationship with the society around them, attempting to assert, and being blocked from expressing, their freedom to think and act.

Wannous’s celebrated 1994 play Tuqus al-Isharat wa-l-Tahawwulat (Rituals of Signs and Transformations), which first premiered in Arabic in 1996 shortly before Wannous’s death and was directed by Nidal Al-Achkar, played in the presence of the playwright at Masrah al-Madina in Beirut. The play was translated to English by Myers and Saab for their volume Sentence to Hope and was staged in a French translation in 2013 at the Comédie Française, directed by Sulayman al Bassam. Wannous wrote over half a dozen works in different styles in the five years before his death in 1997.

Historical Miniatures

Wannous's controversial 1994 epic Munamnamat Tarikhiyya (Historical Miniatures) played in Masrah al-Madina in Beirut in 2001, where it was directed by Nidal Achkar. The play, which is about the betrayal of the Arabs. The play, which takes its form from medieval Eastern miniature paintings, is a strikingly original work that treats the siege of Damascus by Tamurlane (also known as Timur) in the 15^th century from the perspective of the Arabs, who were forced to capitulate to the army of the Turco-Mongol conqueror. Historical Miniatures, however, transcends the genre of historical drama, not only through its fragmentary form, which mirrors the visual genre from which its title is taken, but also through its pointed allegory of the contemporary Arab world, its interrogation of historiography itself and its critique of the disinterested political stance of Ibn Khaldun. In the two months that comprise the bulk of the play’s action, Ibn Khaldun, who views Tamurlane’s conquest of the Arabs as a consequence of the natural rise and fall of nations, refuses to intervene to try to prevent Tamurlane’s victory and ultimately collaborates with the conqueror. Not surprisingly, Wannous’s critical rendering of the revered historian was met with opprobrium by many Arab scholars and intellectuals, but theater historians and literary critics continue to view the play as one of Wannous’s most significant.

The dramatic readings of scenes and discussion of HistoricalMiniatures, which constitutes a kind of summa of Wannous’s ouevre, will provide the ideal conclusion to the program’s overview of the life and work of one of the 20^th century’s most significant cultural figures. The readings will be directed by Robert Myers and Sahar Assaf, and the performers reading the scenes will be Islam Balbaa, Liana Al Afuni Assef Badr, Maria Bechara, Myrna Davonne, and Tarik Kdiry.

Organizers

Robert Myers (Producer/Director) is a Professor of English and former director of the Alwaleed Center for American Studies and Research (CASAR) at the American University of Beirut (AUB). He holds a PhD from Yale in Spanish and Portuguese languages and literatures, where he studied with María Rosa Menocal. In addition to articles about literature and culture from the Arab world, Spain and Latin America, he edited and translated Sentence to Hope: A Sa’dallah Wannous Reader (Yale UP) and Modern and Contemporary Political Theater from the Levant (Brill) with Nada Saab, co-edited Sa’dallah Wannous: Syrian Playwright and Public Intellectual (Cambridge UP) with Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, and edited Latin America, al-Andalus and the Arab World (AUB Press). He has produced more than half a dozen plays in Beirut in Arabic and English, including King Lear, Blood Wedding, An Enemy of the People, and Rituals of Signs and Transformations and The Rape, both by Wannous. He is the author of over 15 plays that have been performed at major theaters in the U.S., including Atwater: Fixin’ to Die, The Lynching of Leo Frank and Dead of Night: The Execution of Fred Hampton. His play Mesopotamia, in which Kathleen Chalfant played Gertrude Bell, was presented at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center when he was the center’s Franke Visiting Artist/Scholar, and his play A Thousand Strange Places: Anthony Shadid and the Middle East was presented in 2022 at Yale’s MacMillan Center. It was accompanied by a panel of renowned journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post and NPR.

Nada Saab is an Associate Professor of Arabic Studies in the Liberal Studies Department at Lebanese American University. She led the program in Arabic literature and language and is an affiliate of the University’s program in comparative literature. She holds a PhD from Yale in Religious Studies. Her publications include Sufism Black and White: A Critical Edition of Kitab al-Bayad wa-l Sawad, which she co-edited with Bilal Orfali (Brill); Modern and Contemporary Political Theater from the Levant, translated and edited with Robert Myers (Brill); “Sufi Negotiation of the Qu’ranic Text and its Prophetic in the Literature of Abu Said al-Kharraz” in The Qu’ran and Adab: The Shaping of Literary Traditions in Classical Islam, edited by Nuha Shaar (Oxford UP); and Sentence to Hope: A Sa’dallah Wannous Reader, translated and edited with Robert Myers (Yale UP). Sentence to Hope, published in Yale’s Margellos World Republic of Letters series, received the prestigious Sheikh Hamad Translation Award (Best Arabic to English literary translation, 2019) and was selected the #1 book of translation of Arabic literature in 2019 by Al Jazeera.

Participants

Nidal Al-Achkar is a Lebanese artist, born in Dick El-Mehdi, Metn. She played a leading role in launching the theatre movement specifically, and culture generally, in Lebanon and the Arab world, with the aim of renewing its horizons, its dialect and its instruments. An actor and director, Nidal graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA). Her encounter and training with Joan Littlewood changed her vision about theatre. A cultural provocateur to the core, she and a group of artists founded “The Beirut Theatre Workshop” in 1968. It was a period of splendor for the groundbreaking theatre movement in Lebanon, lasting until the outbreak of the civil war in 1975, and producing tens of plays which shook and provoked Lebanese society because they dealt boldly with contemporary social, political and regional issues. In 1984, Nidal Al-Achkar established in Amman, Jordan, the “Arab Comedians” theatre company; it was the first troupe of artists founded from 13 different Arab countries. The “Comedians” took its craft to many countries in the region, crowning its tours in London’s Royal Albert Hall. She contributed through her theatrical body of work in transforming Lebanese theatre from its elitism to a more accessible and popular form. Meeting this major challenge bestowed on Nidal’s work the quality of contemporariness, of daring and of ever improving standards. She added grace, strength, and creativity through her distinctive performances in a number of important Lebanese and Arab T.V. productions and Arab and international films. This led her to occupy a prominent position among the established artistic and cultural personalities in Lebanon and the Arab world. Nidal Al-Achkar livened up Arab poetry with several innovative recitals and promoted verse as a popular and dramatic tool to communicate with a wide public. She took this art form to most Arab and European countries, as well as to the Americas, initially as a solo performer, and later accompanied by famous singers and actors. She participated in many lectures, discussions, conferences, and seminars concerning cultural issues, including, theatre ,the arts and social, political, and gender issues. She has been a member of several Arab and international juries for theatre, movie and showbiz events. She has received numerous national and international honors, most notably from the French government in 1997, when she was awarded a Chevalière des Arts et des Lettres. She also received the Tunisian government’s most prestigious presidential award in 1995, the National Order of the Cedar from the president of the Lebanon in 2016, the Officiers des Arts et des Lettres in 2016 from the French government, and the Silver Lebanese Order of Merit in 2019. In 2018 in Choueifat Theatre, the Lebanese minister of culture launched the Nidal Al Achkar annual prize for performing arts, and she has also been highly honored by Lebanese American University and Antonine University. In 1994, she established Masrah Al-Madina, which quickly became the center of gravity for all cultural and artistic activities in Beirut. Masrah Al-Madina was a magnet for the young, the old and the in-between, for intellectuals and laypeople, for the poor, the rich and the disenfranchised, thereby heralding the rebirth of Beirut as a vibrant and defiant city once again. Sitt Nidal, as the Lebanese and Arab press likes to call her, is currently Founder, Chairperson and Artistic Director of Masrah Al-Madina Cultural and Arts Center. The Center is composed of two performance areas, a training section, an exhibition hall and a coffee shop. Nidal founded the Center after renovating a historic cinema in Beirut and made it available to Lebanese civil society. Both Nidal and Masrah Al-Madina will continue to promote culture, art and artists, and through them to inspire change and instill new values. Nidal Al Achkar is married to Mr. Fouad Naïm (journalist and painter) and mother of Omar Naïm and Khaled Naïm.

Sahar Assaf (Director) is a Lebanese theatre-maker and the Executive Artistic Director of Golden Thread Productions in San Francisco, the first U.S. theatre company dedicated to works from and about the Middle East. She also serves as a part-time consultant to the Theater and Performing Arts Commission at the Ministry of Culture in Saudi Arabia. Her recent directing credits include The Tutor, by Torange Yeghiazarian (New Conservatory Theatre Center), Stamp Me, by Yussef El Guindi, and Drowning in Cairo, by Adam Ashraf Elsayigh (Golden Thread). For the Theater Initiative at the American University of Beirut, which she co-founded with long-term collaborator Robert Myers, Sahar directed a diverse range of works, including plays by García Lorca, Shakespeare, Sa’dallah Wannous, and Issam Mahfouz. She also directed site-specific, devised, immersive, and documentary plays addressing pressing social and political issues. She has presented works in the Arab World, Europe, and the U.S. and has published articles in Arab Stages and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. She has contributed chapters to books such as Theatre in the Middle East between Performance and Politics (edited by Babak Rahimi, Anthem Press, 2020) and The Theatre of Sa’dallah Wannous (edited by Sonja Mejcher-Atassi and Robert Myers, Cambridge University Press, 2021). A Fulbright recipient, she holds an MA in Theatre Studies from Central Washington University and an MA in Sociology from the American University of Beirut. Sahar is also an alumna of Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab (2014) and Directors Lab North (2017), and the co-founder of Directors Lab Mediterranean. She proudly balances (or tries to!) her theater work with her role as a mother to Zad!

Marvin Carlson: Sidney E. Cohn Professor Emeritus of Theatre, Comparative Literature and Middle East Studies at the City University of New York. His research and teaching interests include dramatic theory and Western European theatre history and dramatic literature. His many books include The Haunted Stage, Performance:A Critical Introduction, and his best-known study, Theories of the Theatre (Cornell UP, 1993), which has been translated into seven languages. He is the founding editor of Arab Stages, published by CUNY’s Martin Segal Theater Center, the only English-language journal devoted to theater from the Arab world.

Rami G. Khouri is a Palestinian-American academic and journalist whose family resides in Beirut, Amman, and Nazareth. During his 50-year career in journalism he was editor of The Jordan Times and The Daily Star (Beirut) newspapers and contributed reporting and opinion pieces from the Middle East to The Financial Times, The Washington Post, NPR, BBC radio, and other outlets. He founded and managed the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs (IFI), at the American University of Beirut, where he also was the university's Journalist in Residence, and still heads the Anthony Shadid Archives Research Project Working Group at the Center for American Studies and Research. He has been a Harvard Nieman Journalism Fellow and a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a Fellow of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs in Arab East Jerusalem. He has been a visiting scholar at Villanova, Oklahoma, Stanford, Mt Holyoke, Syracuse, and Tufts universities. He is currently a distinguished fellow at IFI-AUB, a senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington, DC, and a regular oped contributor to Aljazeera online. His texts and interviews are available on Substack and X @ramikhouri. He has published books on socio-economic development and archaeology in Jordan, and co-edited with Helena Cobban the book Understanding Hamas and Why that Matters, published in October 2024 by O/R Press in New York.

Mona Knio Dr. Mona Knio is a retired Associate Professor of Theatre at the Lebanese American University (LAU) in Beirut. She earned her Ph.D. in Theatre Studies from Leeds University, UK, in 1994. During her tenure at LAU, Knio served as Chairperson of both the Arts and Communication Division and the Communication Arts Department. In these roles, she was instrumental in the enhancement of the Communication Arts program, particularly in advancing the theatre arts curriculum. Her expertise encompasses stage visual arts, theatre management, and craft techniques. Knio supervised over 500 student-led stage productions and played a pivotal role in organizing 18 editions of the International LAU Theatre Festival, fostering a platform for showcasing emerging talent. She has established valuable networks with prominent theatre festivals across the region and Europe, providing students with opportunities for exposure and collaboration. In addition to her academic contributions, she has served as a lighting designer and technical director at Masrah Al Madina, where she currently holds a board membership. Her passion for the arts is reflected in her commitment to conducting workshops focused on various aspects of theatrical arts and crafts across the region. At present, Knio chairs the board of the Arab Theatre Training Centre. Her research interests are centered on theatrical visual arts, with a particular focus on shadow play traditions in the Arab region.

James A. Reilly is Professor Emeritus of modern Middle East history at the University of Toronto. His special area of interest is the Ottoman-era history of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, and their peoples’ experiences of early modernity. His books are A Small Town in Syria: Ottoman Hama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Peter Lang, 2002); The Ottoman Cities of Lebanon: Historical Legacy and Identity in the Modern Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2017); and Fragile Nation, Shattered Land: The Modern History of Syria (I. B. Tauris, 2019). Selected articles include “Status Groups and Propertyholding in the Damascus Hinterland, 1828–80,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 21 (1989); “Past and Present in Local Histories of the Ottoman Period from Syria and Lebanon,” Middle Eastern Studies 35 (1999); “Ottomans in Syria: ‘Turkish Colonialism’, or Something Else?”, in Comparing Colonialism: Beyond European Exceptionalism (Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2020); and “Kurds and the State in Modern Syria,” in The Political and Cultural History of the Kurds (Peter Lang, 2022).

Edward Ziter is a Professor of Theater Studies at NYU, Tisch School of the Arts. He is a theatre historian with particular interest in the intersections between European and Arab performance traditions. His most recent book, Political Performance in Syria: From the Six-Day War to the Syrian Uprising (2014), was co-winner of the Joe A. Calloway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theater. Other publications include The Orient on the Victorian Stage (2003) as well as articles on Shakespearean actors and comic actors of the Romantic and Victorian periods and on contemporary theatre and film in the Arab World. He is editor of Arab Stages, published by CUNY’s Martin Segal Theater Center. He served as Middle Eastern area editor for the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Stage Actors and Acting (2015). He is Affiliate Faculty in the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, the Department of English, the Department of Performance Studies, and the Theater Program at NYU Abu Dhabi. His current research focuses on nationalist performance during the Arab Renaissance (the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries), focusing on Arabizations of Romantic dramas and Shakespeare.

Performers

Islam Balbaa (www.islambalbaa.com), an Egyptian-Canadian actor and now a New Yorker, is a member of ACTRA, AEA and CAEA. His recent film/TV work includes Transplant the number-one drama show on CTV, the docu-series Air Crash Investigation on the Discovery Channel, and a lead in the feature film Banned. He is a theater actor with 15 years of experience, having acted in Murder on the Nile Off-Broadway in New York, as well as various plays in Canada. He wrote, produced and directed three sold-out comedy plays in Arabic that toured in Canada. He founded the production company Balmour Productions and has directed 12 short films presented at film festivals. He founded an Arabic improv group in New York and has a YouTube a channel on his acting journey https://www.youtube.com/@PharaohActor). He is beyond excited to perform a staged reading with a panel at Yale for the second time and to work with Robert Myers and Sahar Assaf on Wannous’s plays.

Liana S. Afuni (www.lianaafuni.com/instagram: @lafuni) is a performer, writer and matchmaker (by day) living in New York. Recently, Liana participated in a staged reading of The Revolution’s Promise as produced by the Freedom Theatre in Jenin. She is currently in production for a digital series titled White Arab Problems, based on her solo show, which has been performed at numerous comedy venues in NYC. She is happy to be gracing the stage at Yale for the first time.

Assef Badr (Instagram: @assef_ba) is an actor recently graduated from Western Connecticut State University in Stratford, CT. Professional stage acting includes Water by the Spoonful (A Ghost/Professor Amman) at Capital Classics Theater Company. Professional Film acting includes Desert Warrior (VO), directed by Rupert Wyatt. WCSU credits include Three Sisters (Andre), Fairview (Jimbo), Big Love (Oed), Metamorphoses (Male Understudy/Scenic Charge), and the one-act play Password (Quido).

Maria Bechara is a Lebanese actress, vocalist and teaching artist based in New York. She holds an MFA in Acting from the Actors Studio Drama School and has been part of several student and professional film and stage productions. Select stage credits include Meteor Shower (Corky), The Moors (The Moorhen), No Demand No Supply (Lana), The Piedmont Plays Cycle (Fatimah), and Blood Wedding (Bride). TV credits include Thawani (Eagle Films) and, more recently, short films such as Wading and A Thousand Nights Over One. Maria is incredibly grateful to be working with Robert Myers and Sahar Assaf again and sharing more Arab voices and stories in the US, as well as working with a wonderful cast, whom she has had the pleasure of collaborating with in recent Arabic improv shows, led by Islam Balbaa. Maria is excited to be back at Yale two years later for another staged reading.

Myrna Davonne is a New York-based actress of Lebanese descent. She holds an MFA in Acting from the Actors Studio Drama School, and she has had the privilege of learning from legends such as Ellen Burstyn and Bradley Cooper. Born and raised in Brussels to Lebanese parents, Myrna spent much of her life searching for a place to call home, which she ultimately found in the transformative art of acting. Her passion led her to the U. S., where she earned a BA in Theater from Connecticut College. Her acceptance into the Actors Studio Drama School was the realization of a lifelong dream. She recently appeared in the short films Why Do I Need You?, which has earned multiple awards and festival selections, and Summer Tides. She has made appearances in various series, including the web series The Arab Olympics. She is also a proud member of a vibrant Arabic-speaking improv group in New York City, which fosters unity through dynamic performances while allowing her to celebrate her heritage. In her non-acting pursuits, Myrna is also a dedicated grant writer, using her creativity and skills to promote healing and support communities in need.

Tarik Kdiry is an engineer turned actor based in Hoboken, NJ. While studying theater technique at HB Studio in New York City, Tarik has starred in student films for film festivals and, most recently, performed the role of Master of Ceremonies for the New York City-based Arabic Improv Group. As someone who believes strongly in art that is representative of one’s culture and who has deep ties to and appreciation for his Moroccan heritage, Tarik is eager to bring the Arabic works of Sa’dallah Wannous to life with his castmates. Offstage and off-set Tarik enjoys playing music, deep rants about film, and finding the next cool coffee capital.

Summaries of Wannous’ Principal Plays

From The Theatre of Sadallah Wannous: A Critical Study of the Syrian Playwright and Public Intellectual. Robert Myers and Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, editors. Cambridge University Press, 2021

Faṣd al-dam (1963) (Bloodletting) is one of the earliest manifestations of Wannous’ life-long preoccupation with the Palestinian question. Written before the PLO was formed, at a time when the Palestinians were dispersed, ignored by Arab leaders and risked losing their identity, the play presents an eager, disciplined and patriotic young Palestinian, Ali, who strives to enfranchise his people but is eventually led astray by his pleasure-seeking double, ʿEleawah (nickname for Ali). ‘Eleawah mocks the cause of liberation, leads Ali into a life of dissipation and weakens Ali’s political convictions. The play ends with Ali, who eventually returns to his senses, stabbing his alter-ego to death, “to let my rotten blood gush” (al-Anezi, 43), so he can reengage with the struggle for freedom that has given his life meaning (al-Anezi 40-44). One of Wannous’ early and least complex works, Bloodletting was not particularly successful either artistically or politically. It was a philosophical work that employed somewhat facile expressionistic elements and, appearing as it did in a 1964 edition of al-Adab (Belles Lettres) devoted to the Palestinians, was intended more for the page than the stage. As such, it clearly did not mobilize a broad audience. As Al-Anezi suggests, its political ineffectiveness was in part a function of its “psychological crudity” and “unconvincing rhetoric” (44). Nevertheless, thematically it is a significant precursor of Wannous’ “theater of politicization” and later plays that address the Palestinians such as The Rape, and, according to Ziter, it was “the first Syrian play with a Palestinian protagonist written after the Arab-Israeli war [of 1948] and may very likely be the first such play in Arabic” (Ziter 2015, 105).

Maʾasāt bāʾiʿ al-dibs al-faqīr, (1964) (The Tragedy of the Poor Molasses Seller) is a Kafkaesque allegory (Carlson, in this volume, 6) that exposes the abuses committed by Arab leaders and criticizes those who succumb to fear and passivity. Set in a town ruled by a ruthless military regime where people are kept in fear and encouraged to spy on their neighbors, the play is the story of a humble, devout and hard-working vendor, Khaddour, a government agent. Aware of Khaddour’s political naivety, Hassan, who tricks the vendor into thinking they are neighbors and acquaintances, asks about his views on the regime, distorts his words and reports him to the authorities. As a result, Khaddour is deemed a subversive and sent to a prison he will never leave, where he is tortured by agents of successive military rulers who control the city. Al-Anezi remarks that Khaddour’s apparently absurd story should be seen as emblematic rather than exaggerated since “countless stories have been documented about the jailing of innocent people for many years as a result of false evidence” (al-Anezi, 47).

Ḥaflat samar min ajli khamsah ḥuzayrān (1968) (An Evening’s Entertainment for the Fifth of June, 2019). Wannous’ groundbreaking dramatic piece, Evening Party is a metatheatrical play that combines experimental European forms and Arab folk traditions to denounce the Syrian and Arab regimes’ unscrupulous cultural apparatus and to stir the public into political action. The performance begins with an impatient audience (actors playing spectators) tired of waiting for the play they had come to see to start. As they protest, the director appears on stage to explain that the playwright has ditched his script and ruined the performance, and that an evening of poetry would be held instead. But the audience demands that he describes the cancelled play, which turns out to be in fact a state-sponsored, jingoistic celebration of the heroism of the Syrian soldiers who, in fact, were massacred during the six-day Arab-Israeli war in 1967. The director loses control over the public and the performers, and the dramatic narrative is taken over by the playwright, members of the audience and Palestinian peasant refugees who begin to question the facts and the plot of the cancelled play. Their discussion is, in fact, the performance. The play ends with all participants being arrested by intelligence officers who have infiltrated the theater.

al-Fīl ya malik al-zaman (1969) (The King’s Elephant) returns to central themes in Wannous such as absolute power and passivity, corruption and opportunism. The play fuses Arab folk tale from the oral tradition into Brechtian didactic parable to tell the story of Zakariya, a peasant who urges his peers to confront the king after his pet elephant, who is allowed to roam the city, crushes a boy from a poor neighborhood to death. However, when he stands face to face with the king, Zakariya is overwhelmed by his powerful presence. Instead of protesting and seeking justice, he tells him that the people loved his pet so much that he has come to offer to find his elephant a mate. Pleased with the people’s alleged devotion to the animal, the king appoints Zakariya the royal caretaker of his elephant.

Mughāmarat raʾs al-mamlūk Jābir (1970) (The Adventure of the Head of Mamlouk Jabir, 2019) marks another shift in Wannous’ political drama from its focus on action to a call for reflection. The play, an allegory derived from a historical anecdote, revisits one of the most traumatic events in Islamic history, the siege and sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258. It tells the story of a power struggle between the ʿAbbasid caliph and his vizier which precipitated the Mongol invasion. The play, or rather, play-within-a play, is set in a coffeehouse where the patrons who listen to a hakawati (storyteller) function both as audience and critics who react and comment on the scenes actors play out to them. The piece shows history from “below” by focusing on the consequences of the devastation of the city for its ordinary citizens. The protagonist, the vizier’s slave, Jabir, conceives of a stratagem to help his master forge an alliance with his enemy, the Mongol leader, against the caliph in exchange for his freedom. He evades the city’s guards by carrying a message from the vizier to Hulagu Khan that was tattooed on his shaved head now hidden under his grown-in hair. But Jabir pays with his life for meddling in the affairs of the powerful, while the people starve and suffer, victims of their own fears, indifference and passivity. Mamluk Jabir was banned by Syrian censors who saw it as a clear reference to the conspiracies and infighting that brought Hafiz al-Assad to power in 1970.

Sahra maʿa Abī Khalīl al-Qabbānī (1972) (An Evening with Abu Khalil al-Qabbani) is Wannous’ homage to Al-Qabbani, one of the nineteenth-century Arab theater pioneers he most admired. Al-Qabbani, who never travelled to Europe or was influenced by its culture, created a rich indigenous and participatory theater that enraged Syrian religious authorities. In the play, Wannous addresses two of his main concerns, the role of the artist in repressive societies, and the role of the audience in theater—he especially admired al-Qabbani’s use of improvisation and spontaneity, and the “reciprocity between actors and audience” (al-Anezi, 145) in his plays. Wannous’ Evening with al-Qabbani features two parallel stories, the first is the performance of one of al-Qabbani’s works based on a tale from One Thousand and One Nights, called Qout Alquloub. It is the story of Qout, a beautiful slave girl with whom the caliph Haroun al-Rashid falls in love. His astute wife, Zubeida, consumed by jealousy, has the girl drugged and taken outside the city to a cave where, intoxicated, she encounters a young man with whom she has an erotically-charged dialogue. This titillating conversation provokes a stream of objections from audience members and the action stops as a debate about the appropriateness of such a scene takes place. The second tells the story of the feud between al-Qabbani and the bigoted cleric Saʿid al-Ghabra, who believed theater to be immoral and was especially appalled at al-Qabbani’s use of female actors in female roles. This second story ends as it did in the nineteenth century, with the burning of al-Qabbani’s theater, an event that caused the theater artist to flee with his troupe to Egypt (al-Anezi, 146).

al-Malik huwa al-malik (1977) (The King’s the King) closes the cycle of parable plays in which Wannous mixes devices from Brecht’s epic theater—the use of placards, multiple narrators, and circus-like performance—with forms and themes from Arab storytelling and folk tradition. The play signals the end of Wannous’ “theater of politicization,” and suggests his sense of failure in the face of the entrenched authoritarianism, cronyism and corruption of Arab politics and societies. It tells the story of a bored king who goes out incognito for a stroll and overhears a commoner, Abu ʿIzza, boasting that if he were king for a day, he would do what was right for the people. Amused, the king orders his aids to drug Abu ʿIzza, dress him up and take him to court. The next day at court, the real king reacts in disbelief when he is treated as an impostor by his courtiers and the queen, who do not recognize him. For his part, Abu ʿIzza, emboldened by his regal livery and power, becomes a petty tyrant. Although the play clearly echoes Brecht’s A Man in a Man, Wannous countered his critics by insisting it was based on a tale about the caliph Haroun al-Rashid from One Thousand and One Nights. (al-Anezi, 162; Myers and Saab, 192).

al-Ightiṣāb (1989) (The Rape, 2019).Considered a turning point in Wannous’ oeuvre, The Rape marks both his return to theater after an absence of nearly a decade and his departure from socially engaged drama to interrogate the plight of the individual, “the suffering of the self” and “individual characteristics” (Wannous qtd. in al-Anezi, 213). The Rape, which exposes the use of rape and sexual mutilation as interrogation tools by the Israeli political police, tells the story of two families, the Israeli family of a perpetrator, Isaac, a Shin-Bet operative, and the Palestinian family of his victims, Ismaʿil, a freedom fighter, and his wife Dalal. Set during the First Palestinian Intifada in the late 80’s, the story is narrated by an Israeli psychiatrist, Dr. Menuhin, who treats Isaac, and by al-Fariʿa, the older sister of Ismaʿil and a member of the resistance. This disturbing piece that dramatizes sexual violence, racial hatred, and collaboration shows how they ultimately destroy the lives of oppressors and oppressed. Uniquely in modern Arab drama, The Rape features a humane and sympathetic Israeli, Dr. Menuhin, who, in the play’s epilogue, invites the author onstage to discuss the ills of their societies and their responsibility toward them. Because of its sympathetic portrayal of the Israelis and its indictment of the Arab regimes which Wannous deemed quasi-Zionistic, The Rape caused outrage in the Arab world. It was banned in Syria and staged in Beirut in 1991 in an altered version by then Syrian-based, exiled Iraqi director, Jawad al-Asadi, who, in addition to changing the play’s end, cut the Palestinian story and focused on the Israelis, a decision that vexed Wannous (Ziter, 142).

Munamnamāt tārīkhiyya (1993) (Historical Miniatures) marks the beginning of a new cycle characterized by a series of historical plays based on events that took place in Syria and Lebanon. The play, like other works by Wannous, dramatizes a defeat of the Arabs by non-Arabs that was caused to some extent by the actions of the Arabs themselves, in this case the conquest of Damascus by the Tartars, led by the legendary figure Tamurlane, in 1401. On a philosophical level, it is a “complex meditation on history and Arab identity” that focuses on the figure of Ibn Khaldun, a fourteenth-century polymath and a revered figure in Arab culture, who is generally seen as the creator of history writing as an objective, scientific process (Ziter, 2015, 168). The play, however, interrogates Ibn Khaldun’s position as a witness of and participant in history. Its main action focuses on the city’s authorities and notables, who meet in the citadel to discuss possible means to resist the imminent invasion by Tamurlane. These discussions are counterposed with Ibn Khaldun’s debates with his assistant, Sharaf al-Din. Whereas the latter supports community solidarity and resistance, Ibn Khaldun maintains a studied neutrality, a position that becomes especially problematic during the occupation when his support for the resistance would be most useful. Thus, the play’s form conspicuously contradicts Ibn Khaldun’s scientific method since it is structured as a collection of fragmentary narratives with a plotless structure. Moreover, its ironically metaphoric title—a juxtaposition of history and miniature paintings, which is a traditional Eastern style—alludes to the crowded images depicted in these paintings. This style reflects the fractured structure of the real history of the Arabs, which, as Wannous suggests, is yet to be written (Wannous qtd. in al-Anezi, 221).

Aḥlām shaqiyya (1994) (Wretched Dreams) is the more compelling of the two of Wannous’ domestic—as opposed to large and complex historical—plays about life in modern Syria (Carlson, in this volume, 20). It is set in Damascus in the fall of 1963, a detail Wannous emphasizes in the stage directions—“this precise time is not devoid of meaning and substance” (Engl. translation, Myers and Saab, 209)— since this is when the Baʿth Party took control of the country. Wretched Dreams tells the gloomy, anguishing story of the relationship between an older, embittered couple and a young, unhappy family who rents part of their dilapidated home. The play is the first by Wannous in which the protagonists are two women, Mary, the landlady, and Ghada, her tenant, both of whom are trapped in abusive marriages. While Mary endures life with Faris, a gambler and a weakling who lives off her income after giving her, on their wedding night, a venereal disease that has left her sterile, Ghada’s life is dictated by Kazim, a possessive bully, who is a minion of the regime. As the two women become closer, they create an escapist world centered around the idealized figure of a young male boarder onto whom they project their desires (he simultaneously fulfills the role of son for Mary and of lover for Ghada). This new dreamlike existence compels Mary to resort to an extreme measure to rid herself and Ghada of their husbands by poisoning a traditional dish they prepare and serve them. Mary’s plan, however, takes a tragic turn; and although the play ends suggesting that the situation of the two women is immutable, it also dramatizes, for the first time in Wannous’ theater, an instance in which female characters share insights into their realities and struggle for self-actualization and freedom from the roles that were imposed on them.

Ṭuqūs al-ishārāt wal-taḥawwulāt (1994) (Rituals of Signs and Transformations, 2014) is generally considered Wannous’ masterpiece and is one of the five of his six final plays that express his “fascination with the dynamics of history” (Carlson, in this volume, 18). The play is based on historian Fakhri al-Barudi’s description of an incident that divided nineteenth-century Damascus in the wake of a feud between the Mufti, a legal scholar and religious leader, and the Naqib, the leader of the descendants of the Prophet. According to al-Barudi, the Mufti plotted to destroy the Naqib by having him arrested while dallying with Warda, a lavish prostitute, in a private garden. In Wannous’ version, when the Mufti finds out that the Naqib had been arrested and paraded through the streets with his mistress, he devises a plan to free him and plots with the Naqib’s wife, Muʾmina, a sophisticated and fiercely independent daughter of Sheik Mohammad, also a religious leader, to take the place of Warda in the cell. However, the Mufti’s stratagem to disguise his involvement in the Naqib’s downfall and thus placate the fury of the Ottoman governor of Damascus at him for allowing a religious authority to be publicly ridiculed, backfires and sets in motion a chain of events that lead to calamities and personal transformations, threaten institutions and social mores and, ultimately, subvert the established order. Inventively structured as an embedded narrative in which multiple characters experience radical transformations, Rituals addresses, perhaps for the first time in modern Arab theater, themes seen as taboo in patriarchal and religion-based Arab societies such as suicide, honor killing, clerical corruption, homosexuality, the sexual liberation of women and their struggle for self-realization.

al-Ayyām al-maghmūra (1995) (Drunken Days). Completed in 1997, as his cancer had entered an advanced stage and he was approaching death, the play, according to Wannous, is based on the story of the grandmother of the Syrian filmmaker Omar Amiralay, his friend and collaborator. It is set in 1930’s Beirut (a city often viewed as cosmopolitan and westernized) during French rule over Syria and Lebanon and focuses on themes that defined the final phase of Wannous’ theater such as women’s pursue of self-realization in patriarchal, traditional societies and the rise of European cultural hegemony after the collapse of the Ottoman empire. The play, which utilizes various metatheatrical elements, draws on multiple narrators and on a series of apparently disconnected scenes to tell the story of a family secret. The new generation, to whom the secret will be revealed, is represented by the character “Grandson,” the narrator who initiates the storytelling by relating how as a six-year-old boy he met an elderly woman who arrived unexpectedly at his house accompanied by his mother, Layla. The Grandson says that he was introduced to this lady, called Sana⁠ʾ who, his mother told him, was all that his father left to her after he died in World War II. Intrigued by his mother’s apparently intimate relationship with this unknown woman, he begins to ask the latter questions. The narration then shifts to the past to a scene in which Layla recalls how as a little girl she had caught her unhappily married mother speaking to the “Woman,” a character wearing a scarlet dress suggesting she is a jinni, a spirit in Arab tales and Muslim tradition, who in the play functions as a reflection of Sana⁠ʾ and a means by which she verbalizes and nurtures her secret passion for Habib, a Christian trader. Sana⁠ʾ, a Muslim woman, who, as opposed to Muslim men, is not allowed to marry a Christian, initially fights her desire to be with Habib but eventually fails. As a result, she breaks a social and religious taboo by abandoning her home to live with her lover. In the next scene, Layla recalls an episode of her childhood which is apparently disconnected from her mother’s story. In it, she, her two brothers, ʿAdnan, a future police officer and Sarhan, who later attends the American University of Beirut but abandons his studies to become a drug dealer, along with her snobbish Francophile sister, Salma, poke fun at ʿAbdelqader, their father, because of his old-fashioned ways and urge him to change his Ottoman-style clothing to western now that Beirut has become a modern city. The father initially resists but finally agrees, although he refuses to give up his fez. During this scene, the children, with the help of a tailor, playfully change their father’s attire while a tango, a musical craze at the time, plays on the radio. As they make their father over, Layla again surprises Sana⁠ʾ secretly and reproachfully watching her family’s behavior. In addition to the obvious metatheatrical reference to dressing and undressing as a means of changing characters, the scene is a powerful commentary on westernization, and the commodification of novelties such as elegant clothing and music which become social markers and symbols of cosmopolitanism. This scene of ʿAbdelqader's cultural makeover is later mocked by a karagoz, a clown figure and a trickster in Arab puppet shows, in another scene entitled “The competition between the fez and the hat.” The karagoz also appears as a commentator in other scenes, both as comic counterpoint to the jinni that tempts Sana⁠ʾ, and to tone down various melodramatic aspects of the story. In spite of its blatant critique of cultural assimilation and subordination to colonial practices, the focus of Drunken Days continues to be the question of female self-realization and the pursuit of true love, themes that pervade Wretched Dreams and Rituals. The play also evokes elements of Ibsen’s ADoll’s House, although Sana⁠ʾ, unlike Nora who frees herself from male patronage to pursue a new life, acts purely on impulse and out of a blind passion that limits her to feeling guilty and tearfully apologizing to little Layla, who after once again surprising her mother when she is about to leave the family home, turns mute. Meanwhile, ʿAbdelqader devastated by Sana⁠ʾs distressing behavior blames it on the influence of modern ideas, which he naively rejects by returning to his traditional dress. Although the various scenes and narratives that address the plight of Sana⁠ʾ suggest that the play’s aim is to present truth as the product of the various stories that attempt to convey it – for example, in the last scene the karagos asserts ironically that truth is but “a needle lost in a dunghill” and that it “does not exist, and there are only stories and news about the truth,” (al-Anezi, 267)—Wannous is perhaps even more intent on exposing how unhappily married women manifest and experience their desire for pleasure in a genuinely intimate relationship with a lover. Nevertheless, in much the same way that Wannous criticizes the rigidity of Arab values and the importation of modern cultural practices which, paradoxically, further reinforce those values, he points out the limits of liberation “through the erotic sphere” (Myers, “Sa’dallah Wannous,” The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Literature, forthcoming). Thus, Habibi’s excessive attention to and curiosity about details of Sana⁠ʾs life, including aspects of her personal hygiene, soon overwhelm her and, paradoxically, lead her back into “the orbit of her children by the appearance at Habib’s house of her son, ʿAdnan, who has come to kill her to restore the family’s honor but discovers he cannot” (ibid.)

The Theater of Sa’dallah Wannous