A New Dramaturgical Model at AUB

The dramaturgical model I would like to briefly describe to you today is one that I developed with Sahar Assaf at the American University of Beirut over the last five years. We believe that it is a singular model in the Eastern Mediterranean/Middle East/Levant. It began in 2013 with our first production of an English-language version of Tuqus al-Isharat wa Tahawulat (Rituals and Signs of Transformations), by the Syrian playwright Sa’dallah Wannous, which was produced by the American University of Beirut where we both teach and work. We have refined this model in more than half a dozen subsequent productions, including Wannous’s al-Ightisab, The Rape, a 2015 production which was also staged in English; Watch Your Step, a site-specific faux architectural tour of Beirut’s Khandak al-Ghamik neighborhood, performed in Lebanese colloquial Arabic, which was inspired by the Argentine Griselda Gambaro’s Museum for Foreigners; al-Malik Lear, translated to Lebanese vernacular by Sahar, Nada Saab and others, and co-directed by Rachel Valentine-Smith of the Faction Theatre in London; and our most recent production, a site-specific Lebanese vernacular version of Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding, which was staged in the Lebanese village of Hammana. Marvin Carlson, Jean Graham-Jones, Ashley Marinaccio and Fabian Escalona from CUNY attended the production, which was the first event of an international conference at AUB, co-sponsored by CUNY, on “Latin America, al-Andalus and the Arab World,” tracing cultural, literary, linguistic and theatrical continuities among the three regions.

The dramaturgical model we have developed at AUB in Beirut involves using a production course simultaneously as a practicum in which students have a conservatory-style experience and work side by side with seasoned professionals and a dramaturgical course in which we engage in translation studies and practice, textual analysis, theatre and performance history, visual studies and workshop techniques guided by Sahar Assaf, who is the director of the production, and by me. I work as the producer and dramaturg, and we work closely with local professionals, including lighting designers, stage designers, costume designers, composers, etc.

My role as producer is to help conceive of projects, to raise money, oversee the business aspects and help to promote the play. My role as dramaturg includes introducing students to a range of topics associated with the play we are staging, acting as a curator for the director and designers, engaging in textual analysis and adapting the text I co-translate with Nada Saab into English for the productions we do in English. In the brief time I have here today, I’d like to give a few examples of how this process has functioned in our recent productions and make a couple of observations about what our method says about contemporary dramaturgy in the Arab world.

For Rituals and Signs of Transformations, by Wannous, I was a co-translator with Nada Saab of the text itself into English, the second or third language of many of those with whom I was working. Nonetheless, since they could understand the Arab original well, which was written in formal Arabic, my explanations of the process of trying to find an analogous rhetorical register in English necessarily became a form of textual analysis. We also invited a series of scholars to speak on a range of topics that included the concept of public and private space in the 19^th-century Arab city (since the play takes place in Damascus in the 1880s, and the first scene is in a semi-private garden), stage design and concepts of space deriving from Bachelard’s theories and architectural theories, and the play’s clear echoes of Shakespearean sources such as Measure for Measure and Twelfth Night.

For our production of Wannous’s The Rape, which is set during the first Intifada and has Palestinian and Israeli characters, and which was also staged in English, we discussed the different registers of English used by Israelis and Palestinians in the translation; viewed films about the Shin Bet and Palestinian resistance fighters; read and discussed Buero-Vallejo’s play The Double Life of Doctor Valmy, from which Wannous’s play is adapted, and the context of Franco’s dictatorship, which gave birth to the Spaniard’s play; and presented a lecture by a scholar who has written extensively about the history of torture, since one of the play’s central motifs is the use of rape as a tool of interrogation.

To the extent possible, I, in my role as a dramaturg, worked diligently to make sure that neither of these plays was circumscribed within a universe defined by my own or other’s conceptions of Arab or Eastern theater or dramaturgy. Our references, like Wannous’s, were thoroughly cosmopolitan—Shakespeare, Brecht, modern Spanish theatre, feminism, settler colonialism—at the same time that they were informed by specifically local elements—the frame tale, Palestinian proverbs, the authoritarianism of Arab regimes, the pathologies engendered in the region by Zionism.

With Watch Your Step, which was inspired by Gambaro’s play, which has as its caustically ironic premise explaining Argentina’s guerra sucia to foreigners, we searched for analogues to the Lebanese civil war. We investigated putting the piece in the Lebanese National Museum and AUB’s archaeology museum before fortuitously finding a concept—a faux architectural tour in which the tour guide ignores the blatant traces of the civil war—and a predominantly Shi’a neighborhood in the center of Beirut with bullet-ridden buildings, a roofless church, and other clear physical markers of the recent conflict. I should add that since we have a miniscule budget and no permanent performing space, doing site-specific work is less an aesthetic choice than a practical necessity. However, in the case of this piece the necessity of working in communities forced us to work with the local population, including a community ‘Amal militia that offered us “protection” and a production office that was also their local office. It also brought Sahar into contact with an elderly resident who had spent the Lebanese civil war in this battleground neighborhood and was an extraordinary hakawati, or storyteller, whom Sahar included as an integral part of the production.

Our most recent production, Blood Wedding, was, in a certain sense, the culmination of the dramaturgical process we’ve developed together in that it brought various strands of our practice together. I suggested we do the play for several reasons. First, students in a world-theatre course I have taught a number of times at AUB frequently respond to the play as if it were about their world, even though it was of course written by a Spaniard and is set in Spain in the 1930s. Second, my academic mentor María Rosa Menocal’s oeuvre concerns reconfiguring literary and cultural history so that we can see obvious connections, and I’ve increasingly come to view the traditions of the Arab world, the Iberian peninsula and Latin America as one tradition obscured by the fact that it exists primarily in the three principal languages of the regions: Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese. Third, I talked extensively to Marvin Carlson about the course he gave on Islamic theatre, which spans works from Indonesia to Morocco, about how redefining the tradition in this way simultaneously emphasizes its diversity and forces us to consider questions such as, ‘What is Arab theatre?’, ‘What is Islamic theatre?’, ‘What is world theatre?’ The conference I organized on “Latin America, al-Andalus and the Arab world” attempted to do something similar, and seeing Blood Wedding, which was the opening event of the conference, meant that participants would inevitably have to theorize and consider based on a very complex example of practice. Finally, even though Lorca is quite popular in the Arab world, his plays are frequently staged in Lebanon, Egypt and elsewhere, and he has even been assimilated into the Arab canon as political martyr, romantic poet and dramatist by Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish and other contemporary writers, Blood Wedding has, as far as we know, never or very rarely been staged in Lebanon. This is especially odd since Lebanon is a country in which weddings are frequently garish, quasi-theatrical events and a seemingly all-consuming industry.

Let me conclude with a couple of examples of surprising and enlightening dramaturgical practices that emerged out of staging Blood Wedding:

As the basis of the Arabic translation used for our text, Sahar used Langston Hughes’ English translation supplemented by observations of a Spaniard with excellent Arabic.
We began thinking we would do a parody of an extravagant Lebanese wedding with SUVs instead of horses and sequences filmed by drones on the AUB campus and ended up staging the play in a relatively realistic style in a village 45 minutes from Beirut.
We consciously chose to set the play in the early 1970s, shortly before the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war, as means of evoking the 1930s in Spain, emphasizing the fact that a feud between families is a microcosm of civil war and that no one in 1970s Lebanon knew a war was coming, and that a war was preventable.
Lorca was a visual artist, musician, composer, poet and dramatist, who drew on a range of literary and artistic sources, which provided us and our designers with a plethora of starting points.
Finally, circumstances and aesthetics led us to choices that were clearly not within the realm of what many would conceive of as Arab dramaturgy per se. For Act III, the surrealistic dream sequence of the play, Sahar found an abandoned cinema and we settled on a technique for staging the lovers’ attempted escape based in part on a John Jesrun piece I saw at LaMama Annex in the 1980s, in which characters appear in extreme close-up on film and then on a stage that has just been occupied by real, albeit highly allegorical, characters.

The dramaturgy that we have developed in the past half dozen years in Lebanon, at AUB and beyond, is a combination of translation studies, theatre studies and performance history, in conjunction with an eclectic transcultural and multilingual perspective. Our dramaturgical practice is in large measure defined by the fact that we work with bare-bones budgets and actors and artists of varying levels of experience, and we stage our works in a variety of challenging environments. In so doing, we are, I would suggest, helping in some substantial way to redefine what constitutes contemporary dramaturgy in the Arab world.

Robert Myers (www.robert-myers.com) is a Professor of English at AUB. His PhD from Yale is in literature with a specialty in Spanish, Portuguese and Hispano-Arabic literature. He is a director, with Sahar Assaf, of AUB’s Theater Initiative and the director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Alsaud Center for American Studies (CASAR). He is a playwright and cultural historian and the author of over fifteen plays and numerous scholarly and journalistic articles. He has translated over half a dozen plays from Arabic with Nada Saab, including Baghdadi Bath, by Jawad Al Assadi; The Dictator, by ‘Issam Mahfouz; and Rituals of Signs and Transformations (translated with a grant from the MacArthur Foundation) and The Rape, by Sa’dallah Wannous. He produced the latter two in Beirut and The Dictator in New York. He and Nada Saab edited and translated a Wannous reader for Yale University Press, Sentence to Hope, which was published in 2019, and an anthology and critical edition of plays, Modern and Contemporary Political Theater from the Levant, which was published in 2018 by Brill.

Arab Stages
Volume 10 (Spring 2019)
©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publications

Founders: Marvin Carlson and Frank Hentschker

Editor-in-Chief: Marvin Carlson

Editorial and Advisory Board: Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Dina Amin, Khalid Amine, Hazem Azmy, Dalia Basiouny, Katherine Donovan, Masud Hamdan, Sameh Hanna, Rolf C. Hemke, Katherine Hennessey, Areeg Ibrahim, Jamil Khoury, Dominika Laster, Margaret Litvin, Rebekah Maggor, Safi Mahfouz, Robert Myers, Michael Malek Naijar, Hala Nassar, George Potter, Juan Recondo, Nada Saab, Asaad Al-Saleh, Torange Yeghiazarian, Edward Ziter.

Managing Editor: Maria Litvan

Assistant Managing Editor: Joanna Gurin

Table of Contents:

PART 1: Toward Arab Dramaturgies Conference