“It would be impossible to perform it in Syria. There are red lines and the censorship that was there before 2011 is still there today,” said Omar Abu Saada, one of the country’s best-known theater directors.
The play – called While I Was Waiting – is based on the real-life story of a young man found beaten unconscious near a hospital in Damascus in 2013, but the circumstances of his beating and subsequent death remained unclear. Abu Saada knew the man and his family.
2 comments:
It is very interesting when the director, Omar Abu Saada, talks about how the play deals with the two Syrian universal truths, of waiting and loss. These two truths are something everyone experiences just on a different scale and in a much different way than those affected by Syrians dealing with a 7-year conflict. It was also interesting how the show has been done in Brussels, France, U.S., and Japan because it takes a very specific conflict full of universal truths and shows them to an audience not experiencing the conflict. Theatre does a great job of allowing audience members to emphasis in different and uncomfortable situations by taking universal truths and applying them to specific moments. Hopefully this show’s run in Beirut is a success for allowing those affected by the conflict to reflect on what is going on but even more so hopefully the show is effective at portraying the Syrian conflict those who don’t understand or know enough about it.
The Syrian Civil is truly the great tragedy of the 2010s. The international community has done little to stop Assad from butchering his own people and deploying weapons of mass destruction against them. One of the only commendable things President Trump has done is strike back at Assad following his use of chemical weapons earlier this year; however, other than that the international community has done little to nothing to stop this evil dictator. Productions such as this are crucial to spreading these stories of tragedy. The lives that are lost and ruined. The potential that is destroyed. It is beautiful that this was able to be performed so close to the Syrian border, so that people could watch and see how an entire generation of people has been obliterated in a horrendous conflict that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
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