Staging Trauma MESA proposal 2015 From the second half of the twentieth century, theater has played an important role in Syrian political life. From masrah al-tasyis in the 1970s to post-Cold War drama, playwrights connected to the people’s awareness of injustice. In the 1990s, some courageous intellectuals had articulated in code the need to fight the dictatorial Asad regime, yet they had seemed suicidally utopian at the time. “You shall not escape us even while you sleep,” wrote Mamduh Adwan in his 1995 play The Ghoul, “Your victims' vengeance will pursue you for blood... Even if you muzzle their complaints they will haunt you even as ghosts... You have poisoned the life of the people, wounded their souls.” Their predictions came true in the extraordinary outburst of popular anger in 2011. Even after the revolution devolved into civil war and hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed and millions have been displaced, theater is again serving the people even in exile. In this paper, I will examine two plays involving Syrian refugees that were staged in 2014: King Lear in Jordan’s Zaatari camp and Antigone in Beirut. The director of King Lear, Syrian actor Nawwar Bulbul, worked with Syrian refugee children for months, preparing them for this one moment of happiness in the desolation of the crowded camp. Even if only for a short while, theater brought dignity and a measure of agency to Syrians who had lost everything. In December 2014, Syrian refugee women reimagined Sophocles’ Antigone about civil war in Thebes to render their own experiences. Under the direction of Omar Abu Saada, Hiba Sahly intertwines her struggle to bury her brother killed somewhere in Syria with that of the classical Greek heroine. This paper will analyze the contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare and Sophocles in order to understand how these classical plays provided the frame narrative for today’s Syrian refugees to articulate their despair but also their demand for justice.

This paper will examine the phenomenon of experimenting with the “Theater of Testimony,” as outlined by Emily Mann in 1974, particularly in the context of Arab-American theater performance. Writing a documentary play to record the traumas of nine Iraqi women during the various manifestations of the Gulf wars of 1991, 1993, 2005, 2006 was Heather Raffo’s main accomplishment. The manner in which concepts of narrativity/performativity, sexual/state violations, local/global politics, American/Iraqi identities, and past/present are articulated in the play complicates issues of representation and agency. Who can speak for Iraqi women’s pain? What happens to the project of documenting trauma once it crosses national borders? Is the practice of suturing the gaps between performers and audience capable of bridging the representational rift? The play’s multiple, hyphenated voices suggest that a successful documentation and enactment of trauma start with the project of affective decentering, and embodiment with the victimized Other.

This paper examines the loss of the present and the agonizing human condition in Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Ahl al-Kahf (The People of the Cave). Although hailed by Taha Huysan as the first work in Arabic literaturewhich may be properly called ‘drama’ and “an important event, not only in modern Arabic literature alone, but in the whole of Arabic literature,” al-Hakim’s play failed to gain the audience appreciation, causing financial loss to the Opera House Theater where it was performed in 1933. While al-Hakim attributes the failure of audience appreciation to the play’s unsuitability for "the actual stage," there is more to this “failure” than mere belonging to al-Masrah al-Dhihni (Theater of the Mind) as al-Hakim himself proclaimed. A play that opens and ends in the darkness of a cave and is inspired by a Quranic Chapter that addresses the story of a number of believers escaping the ruthless brutality of their society must raise many questions: How can time be "ideological"? Of what reality is "the stage of the mind" in The People of the Cave really the image? Al-Hakim’s play swerves dramatically from the Qur’anic course of the story as an example of God’s ability to protect his believers and resurrect the dead, and offers us instead a staging of human isolation, a death interrupting itself, and a lost ontological battle against time through scattered moments of Aristotelian anagnorosis and peripateia. More specifically, this paper investigates the political and ethical stakes of loss, mourning, and trauma in confronting death after 300 years of deathful sleep. Instead of seeing the loss of self in time as a merely deleterious condition, this paper offers a more nuanced and socially symbolic reading of The People of the Cave as an enactment of loss, a pervasive performativity laden with political allusions, including the possible reading of the sleepers’ final return to he cave as a symbolic rejection of Egypt’s apathy towards its colonial destiny. At stake is a particular level of antithesis performed throughout the play: a tension between the sacred and the secular on the one hand, and the philosophical conundrum of being and time, on the other. The paper interrogates al-Hakim’s capacity to extract humanism from divinity only to connect them both to individual temporality and to the larger drama we call Existence.