Nehad Selaiha gets a taste of real theatre in Roger Assaf's Jnaynet Al-Sanaye' But for the flyers and the play's programme you would never think Al-Sanaye' Park dates back to 1997. Watching it twice last week at the Puppet Theatre (where it was hosted at the initiative of the newly established Al-Mawred Culture Resource Foundation), I was overwhelmed by its electrifying relevance and the metaphoric urgency and eloquence of its stage imagery. It seemed as if it had been put together yesterday or, indeed, today, and the immediacy and starkness of its sense of truth touched one on the raw. And by this I do not mean it was topical, or, at least, not in the usual naïve sense of the word. There was no mention of Arafat's death, no allusion to the Falluja nightmare or any of the tragic events that have lately befallen the Arab world. The historical backdrop -- hazily, unobtrusively projected -- was the Lebanese civil war, its horrors and all the scars it has left behind. Having faced the terrible revelations of this war and living with its memories, the group of actors who confront us in the play -- without masks or make-up, using their real names -- find themselves, like us, shorn of all the basics that were once taken for granted and made sense of the world, of all the comforting illusions and protective shields that held the chaotic flux in and outside at bay and gave one a firm, if false, sense of identity and purpose. Reflecting a postmodernist sensibility, Al-Sanaye' Park, is cast in the meta-theatrical mode, makes a virtue of disorder and fragmentation and goes a long way towards blurring the lines between fiction and reality. Rather than progression, it adopts short- circuiting as a structural principle, so to speak, and unfolds through a series of interruptions and multiple foci. One gets the feeling of a stream of days, inane, mundane and sluggishly, ferociously stupid, suddenly arrested to yield precious spots of time, strange glimpses of truth -- of genuine suffering and genuine joy. Though it uses the much abused tradition of improvisation and the long vulgarised formula of "the play-within-the-play", Jnaynet Al-Sanaye' manages to raise both conventions to new heights of authenticity. And this is achieved through an act of humility, of self-abnegation on the part of the director/ author of the play. Like Eugenio Barba and directors of his ilk who believe in giving the creativity of the performer leeway, Assaf shapes his productions through the interaction of his actors with certain chosen texts to which they bring their own memories, experiences and reflections. As Bernadette Hodeib says mockingly towards the end of the play, "every word we say, every move we make will be taken by him (Assaf) and made part of the performance." But this is not, as she sarcastically concludes, because he has gone bankrupt of ideas and innovations. Assaf gave his actors House Crime by Youssef Salama, An Issue of Identity by Mahassen Ajam, and some press reports and features by Tina Ashkar as initial material to work on and create, through further research, self-exploration and improvisation, not their parts or characters, as would happen in the production of a pre-set text (as Peter Brook did, for instance, in the initial stages of producing A Midsummer Night's Dream, as documented in a published book), but the body and soul of their performance. Antoine Blaban, as the mock-director, the actor assigned the part of representing Assaf on stage in the mock play-within-the-play, tries very hard to impose the traditional sense and dramatic logic on the show and coerce the characters into sticking to the frame murder-story and their assigned parts in it. He is balked at every step, however, as the actors question the motives of the hero and the sense of the whole story. But this is not all. Other characters and parts drawn from the experience of the actors keep impinging on the basic narrative line, producing mini-stories, or, rather, what I would like to call epiphanies, or profound insights into aspects of our daily, lived experience. Take Bernadette Hodeib's series of mini scenes featuring the plight of Asian women employed as nannies and maids by rich Arab families, and getting raped, robbed and abused in the process; Fadi Abi Samra's man-dog sequence where the mental disorientation of a young man causes him to smell fear, hypocrisy, lewdness and corruption and to call a respectable professor an ass to his face just because he smells like one, which, of course, put an end to his academic career; or Hanan Haj Ali's superb sequence of Amna, the housewife, who has lived a slave to her husband all her live and has come to bloom after his death only to be certified mad for her socially irregular and unacceptable behaviour. The question of the veil is also raised in relation to the issues of identity and sectarian discrimination in Mary Bernadette Sfeir's television interview about her relation with a veiled, Muslim friend. Issam Abu Khaled as the actor doomed by the mock-director to star as hero in the frame murder story also contributes a lot towards disrupting the narrative line, introducing, apart from his many objections, argumentations and fabrications, scenes from Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and Richard II. Such scenes and interjections build Issam into a rebellious figure who not only questions the truthfulness of the charges laid at the door of the fictional character he impersonates, but also the nature of play-acting and the limits and efficacy of improvisation as a vehicle for truth to life. What irks him more than anything, however, is the manner of the murder and its implications for the character he is landed with. Yvonne, the landlady he is supposed to have murdered was also raped, cut into pieces, packed in plastic bags and scattered all over the public park. Against this tentative outline of this character, imposed by the framework story, and insisted upon by the director, Issam presents an alternative version. The accused, as he sees him, is a peaceful citizen who has been traumatised by the experience of the civil war and who still retains a remnant of faith in the justice of the law, and, therefore, refuses to leave his prison cell when offered the chance. It would damn him as a culprit for life, he believes. But between the authority of the mock-director, who insists on carrying out the story-line to its predestined end, and the fictional/factual potentates of the law who would stop at nothing to get a confession to neatly wrap up a case, Issam, as the fictional Khalil T, has no chance. The play ends with him swinging from the scaffold. The impact of this finale is truly amazing considering the effort that has been put by the actors into frustrating and diluting it. Indeed, and quite curiously, it seems to tie up all the ropes of the disparate stories we have watched. It is metaphorically the end of Amna who had her one and only orgasm when the hairdresser was washing her hair, whereupon she ceased to visit him, and who was consigned to a mental asylum when she began to enjoy life after her husband died; it is the end of the Sri Lankan maid who was abused and raped by her employers and had to jump down three stories to escape only to land in prison; it is the end of the schizophrenic young man who developed a dog-like hypersensitivity to smells and ended up telling a university professor he was an ass just because he smelt like one. And in the case of the negative characters, it is also the end of the director; of the inanely sophisticated academician called in as witness to the murder; of the dowdy, frustrated neighbour of the murdered woman who sexually craved Khalil T; and of the Christian, Westernised witness who befriends a veiled Muslim. What seems initially like a jumbled mass of episodes, anecdotes, reflections, squabbles and direct addresses to the audience which defy any attempt at organising them into a semblance of a plot, eventually manage, through the actors' power of conviction and the grotesque poetry of the scenery and dialogue, to produce an emotionally cumulative effect so that by the end you could not imagine the play to have ended otherwise. Ultimately, what the play seemed to be reflecting on was definition -- of the self, the other, and the world, a painfully sincere casting around for truth and authenticity, for moral, social, sexual and political bearings. The magical effectiveness of the audio- visual stage imagery was amazingly achieved through an ascetic lighting plan by Sarmad Louis, a frugal, minimalist set (by Sarmad Louis and Marc Mourani), consisting of a low fence or barricade on the right (from the point of view of the audience), plus a huge, mobile wooden crane on wheels (manipulated in full view of the audience by Sarmad) which brought in the necessary accessories -- a step-ladder for the Sri Lankan maid on which she swung forlornly, a cage to encase the accused; Khalil T, a door with a few steps leading up to Yvonne's house, or a scaffold from which Khalil hangs. The swinging motion of the ladder, the cage and the scaffold united with the lighting and Cynthia Zavin's music to produce some breath-taking effects and seemed to sum up and condense the mood and meaning of the piece. Also, the swing from the open theatricality of the piece, or, rather, its meta-theatricality, which openly presented theatre as a game of fabrication, to the magic of forceful illusionism at the blink of an eye was something unprecedented in my experience of theatre. The effect was something akin to that heady feeling one experiences hanging between heaven and earth, dream and reality, sleep and waking, or the sensation of a rope walker hanging in mid air.
