Introduction

Eyad Houssami

Writing about theatre fuels the process of making theatre. It is the drama critic and cultural historian whom society entrusts to capture what happens when audiences bear witness to performance. The critic, the scholar, the researcher – we rely on them to perceive action unfolding on the stage, to apprehend moments of horror and joy, to question why performance matters, and to register the slivers of truth that flash and restore our humanity.

Likewise, the playwright, actor, designer, dramaturg, or director who reflects on her work through writing not only strengthens her artistry through introspection and self-questioning, but she also inscribes her creative process onto the genealogy of theatre history. Indeed, to record the mundanity and profundity of artistic endeavors is to affirm our ability to imagine, propose, and inhabit alternative realities together through performance. Anecdotes about the invincibility and vulnerability that actors explore in rehearsal, stories about the bizarre and beautiful intimacy shared by strangers in the theatre – these accounts attest to how artists dare to tread unknown ontological frontiers. They document how making theatre is an endless experiment – of exploring what it means to be present, of enacting new ways of living together in the present, of transforming the givens of daily life, of remembering how to live.

These insights immortalize theatrical experience. They survive and often remain the most precious trace of performance, an inescapably ephemeral art bound by the exclusivity of the present. These accounts lift theatre from its fleeting moment and resurrect it in the imaginations of readers in another time and another place. Thus, through theatre writing, performance embarks on a journey that swiftly transcends borders and languages.

This book is a collection of essays on contemporary theatre and performance with a focus on the Arab stage. The writings revolve around the legacy of Saadallah Wannous, the late Syrian dramatist whose plays about tyranny resonate with audiences worldwide. Authored by playwrights, directors, and scholars in Arabic and English, these essays and accounts trace the reverberations of Wannous's repertoire in the Arab Middle East and beyond. The book brings together literary analyses of drama, histories of theatrical production, and narratives about making and teaching plays. In that regard, Doomed by Hope: Essays on Arab Theatre testifies to the singular force of playwriting, an artistic and literary craft that chronicles history, orchestrates dialogue, and forges culture.

It is my hope, as steward of the essays in this volume, that this book enables directors in Baghdad to glimpse into the theatre classroom of Birzeit University; that it allows actors in Port Said to envisage rehearsal in Kuwait; that it prompts playwrights in Tunis to consider the differences between theatre research in New York, Cairo, and Damascus; that it invites audiences to think more critically and deeply about theatre. Above all, the purpose of this book is to impart the knowledge and experiences of artists and scholars to those who have the desire to make and explore theatre but lack interlocutors.

The obstacles facing theatre practitioners in oligarchical and authoritarian Arab societies are daunting. In addition to the global onslaught of consumerism and proliferation of screens, decades of occupation by foreign forces and oppressive regimes have stifled culture and education, to say nothing of science and industry. Endemic corruption has rendered public speech void of meaning. Public discourse, so glutted with propaganda, has corroded the Arabic language itself, and the endless brain drain continues to drive highly literate and learned citizens into the diaspora. Nonetheless, and seemingly against all odds, theatre endures.

I first set out to make this book in 2008 when I was living in Damascus. The project emerged from a series of living room conversations with Dr. Marie Elias, a theatre scholar and translator who worked closely with Wannous. At the time, I was reading his plays and theatre writings and came across the address "Thirst for Dialogue," which he authored in 1996 for World Theatre Day, created by the International Theatre Institute, an affiliate of UNESCO.

Born in 1941 in a village north of Tartous, Syria, Wannous trained as a journalist in Cairo before devoting his life to theatre as a playwright, editor, administrator, and educator in Damascus. He authored 14 plays, penned dozens of theatre writings, established and edited the journal Hayat Al Masrah (Life of Theatre), and participated in the founding of the High Institute of Dramatic Arts in Damascus in the late 1970s, one of the only theatre conservatories in the entire Arab Middle East.

"Thirst for Dialogue" is among the last texts he wrote before he died of cancer in 1997. In the address, Wannous deplores the paradoxes of global capital and the technological revolution. Despite extraordinary wealth and greater interconnectivity, economic inequality increases, culture withers, society fragments, and the isolation of the individual grows deeper. The "global village" utopia is in fact a dystopia that has endangered theatre. Wannous laments that theatre has never before suffered from such neglect, such a lack of moral and financial support.

He draws parallels between "self-serving globalization," void of any trace of humanity, and the cancer infesting his body. He cites playwriting as "the most significant means of [his] resistance" against the disease. Playwriting prolongs life, and through his dying days, Wannous persists. Writing for theatre acquires existential meaning, perhaps even biological utility. Despite his acknowledgment that theatre was and remains "under siege [by the forces of neoliberalism] and on the verge of vanishing from our lives," Wannous does not waver:

I insist on writing for the theatre because I want to defend it. I struggle so that this vital art will go on living ... Theatre is in fact more than art. It is a complex civilizational phenomenon. If we lose and deprive ourselves of theatre, the world will become a more forlorn, ugly, and impoverished place.

His prophecy may be grim, but Wannous concludes his address on a note of optimism, "convinced" that goodwill shall prevail and protect culture, and that, in turn, theatre will return to its rightful place: "We are doomed by hope, and come what may, today cannot be the end of history."

That phrase, "doomed by hope," occurs as a refrain in his address. It resonated with Wannous's public and to this day holds remarkable currency in Arab culture, certainly in theatre. In "Thirst for Dialogue" and his repertoire more broadly, Wannous renders hope a paradoxical force: as it kindles our faith in the promise of the future, it propels humanity towards the oblivion of death. Evoking the image of a cancer-stricken man, "doomed by hope" also conveys the Sisyphean nature of making theatre in societies ruled by totalitarian or oligarchical regimes that stifle and punish artists who dare to challenge the prescriptions for cultural expression. Come what may, we are condemned to defend theatre.

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When I was studying and practicing theatre as an undergraduate at Yale, I sensed the dire need for what this book has become. When, a decade after Wannous's passing, I moved to Damascus and then to Beirut, my experiences as a theatre artist, critic, and researcher affirmed the book's urgency. When revolts and uprisings began to unfurl across the Arab Middle East in late 2010, I couldn't help myself: I had to bring the idea to fruition.

In the book's inception, I turned to the very scholars, critics, and historians whose theatre writings had first lured me to the Arab Middle East: Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson, and Marie Elias. Revered, widely published, and endlessly knowledgeable, they lent their expertise to the project by helping to shape its conceptual foundations. I sought support from the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development and, with the Fund as a partner, launched the call for papers in Arabic and English on March 15, 2011, the day often described as the start of nationwide revolts against the Assad regime in Syria.

We sought original contributions in both languages from academics and artists and invited submissions – critical though not necessarily academic – that investigated the central themes and questions of Wannous's "Thirst for Dialogue," particularly in theatre and performance from the Arab Middle East. We encouraged writers to draw on their personal experience, reflecting deeply on a life in the theatre.

Many, if not most, books about Arab theatre and culture maintain the wide lens of a regional or national survey. They obscure the nuances that characterize the multitude of societies in the Middle East and the diaspora in order to draw sweeping, essentializing conclusions about a land mass, a religion, a language, or 300 million people. Moreover, rarely do artists themselves author the narratives, analyses, or research that form the central pillars of cultural historiography. Scholars, ensconced in universities, steer the discourse, which privileges theoretical approaches reliant on already published and archival material at the expense of experiential accounts, which almost never materialize in print. By seeking the insights of practitioners in addition to the invaluable perspectives of researchers, Doomed by Hope aims to bridge the gap between the academy and the stage in theatre historiography, as actor Hanane Hajj Ali did in her notable book, Theatre Beyrouth.

Moreover, we wished to complicate and deepen the discourse by grounding the book in questions, at once historically specific and intellectually abstract, in an effort to unsettle the parameters that usually bound writing about culture in Arabic and English. Notions of origin, authenticity, censorship, nationhood, postcolonialism, Islam, and dissent frame and saturate discussions about culture, usually assessed and interpreted in terms of its political cunning to the exclusion of its aesthetic, poetic, philosophical, and psycho-emotional qualities. We strived to coalesce these various approaches to interpreting art by asking contributors to probe if and how theatre "will remain the ideal place where man can reflect upon both his historical and existential condition," as Wannous said in his address.

We received a total of 40 submissions and proposals in Arabic and English. Due to the exigencies of the political situation, a number of prolific and innovative theatre makers could not participate. Some directors and playwrights in Tunisia and Syria, for instance, were pivotal to revolt, social movement, and uprising. The extraordinary urgency and tremendous demands of activism left little time for writing. Those who did respond to the call for papers hailed from Morocco to Saudi Arabia to New Zealand as well as countries engrossed by protest, and the submissions ran the gamut from descriptive chronologies of national theatre histories, teeming with lists and genealogies, to personal memoirs.

The texts were reviewed by the core editorial committee – Drs. Selaiha, Carlson, and Elias – and a number of external Arabic and English readers outside the field. I was determined to see a book like this come to fruition in both English and Arabic, as opposed to only Arabic, because I believed that the editorial and rhetorical practices of the two languages would enrich the project with a singular diversity and would reflect divergent ways of thinking about – and therefore making – theatre. There is a dire need for crosspollination and exchange between Anglophone and Arabophone theatre. Translation of dramatic literature and theatre scholarship between the two languages is tragically minimal. Each theatre culture needs and benefits from translation. After all, theatre is inherently multilingual, embracing as it does stories and characters from myriad acts of human history.

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The histories, analyses, and narratives in Doomed by Hope focus on the process of contemporary theatre practice. Together, with an arresting foreword by novelist Elias Khoury, the essays zoom into definitive moments of Saadallah Wannous's life and repertoire, and they illuminate how Wannous's legacy manifests itself in and informs theatre today – from reading plays in a classroom and writing plays for a city to performing in a security state and directing in theatres, prisons, and international festivals in a time of revolt.

The photography, by Dalia Khamissy, Yazan Khalili, and Joseph Seif, consolidates these elements of the book. The series of portraits and photographs of venues and universities not only serve to flesh out the settings and characters that populate the pages of this book, but the photography also culls together the various spaces in which contemporary theatre develops and happens: the stage, laptop screen, kitchen table, home, backstage, conservatory, neighborhood, art school, and university. Through photography, we were also able to include artists like playwright Mohammad Attar, actor Fadi Abi Samra, directors Oussama Ghanem and Issam Boukhaled, and the performers of Collectif Kahraba, as well as venues such as the Egyptian National Theatre in Cairo's Attaba Square and Beirut Theatre in the Lebanese capital. While these artists and settings do not necessarily illustrate a particular essay in the book, they engage directly with the themes and questions of Doomed by Hope, and they stand at the forefront of the struggle to defend theatre, as Wannous put it.

In the first two essays of Doomed by Hope, scholars Edward Ziter and Rania Jawad analyze plays by Wannous and shed light on how his theatre dislodges the structures of tyranny, from the mid twentieth century until today. Ziter, a professor of drama at New York University (NYU), situates Wannous's seminal play, Soirée for the 5th of June (1968), in the wake of Syria's stupefying defeat in the 1967 War with Israel, a catastrophe that few intellectuals and artists dared to address critically. As it attributes defeat to the paralyzing practices of totalitarianism, Soirée overturns the hierarchy of state-sanctioned theatrical representation, subsequently enabling the audience to defy the state and to forge a national identity, as Ziter maintains.

Rania Jawad writes about teaching Wannous in Birzeit University as revolts unfurl across the Arab Middle East. A PhD candidate at NYU, Jawad sheds light on the links between theatre and the performances of power acted out in Israel-Palestine. Her essay parses student readings of Wannous and pedagogical techniques in Palestine before shifting the focus to theatre practice in a West Bank refugee camp.

The essays by Dalia Basiouny and Samia Habib about theatre in Egypt investigate the construction of collective memory in a time of revolt. Basiouny, a theatre artist and drama teacher at the American University in Cairo, discusses the creative and production process of her documentary theatre performance, Tahrir Stories, presented in Cairo as the Egyptian revolution was erupting. Habib, a cultural critic, offers a glimpse of theatrical activity on a national level in the spring following the ouster of former president Hosni Mubarak.

From the vantage point of university professors and scholars, Katherine Hennessey, Asaad Al-Saleh, and Meisoun Ali explore theatre in Yemen and Syria in the years leading up to the 2011 revolts. Hennessey hones in on three performances in 2009 and 2010 in Yemen, arguing that theatre presaged how, just a couple of years later, youth protestors would enact their desires for social and political change in public spaces. Al-Saleh and Ali ground their contributions in playwriting in Syria from Wannous to the years leading up to the present. Assistant professor of literature and cultural studies at the University of Utah, Al-Saleh anchors his academic essay, like Ziter, in Soirée for the 5th of June but offers an alternative reading of Wannous's theatre. He highlights the function of dialogue in Soirée and other plays while also referring to literary and cultural scholarship published in Arabic. Ali, a professor at the High Institute of Dramatic Arts in Damascus, foregrounds the voices of the new generation of Syrian writers in order to raise questions about the trajectory of playwriting.