Imag/ing Theatre in Wajdi Mouawad's Seuls

Wajdi Mouawad's political, often epic, theatre leaves a searing impression on audiences. His intimate performance Seuls, which premiered in March 2008, is his semi-fictional reflection on leaving Lebanon as a child during the 1970s civil war.1 In Seuls, Mouawad produces a fictional other, Harwan, whose childhood emigration and assimilation compromise his self-knowledge and capacity for happiness. The character's sympathetic but anguished self-doubt finds release in the course of this performance through sensation, color, and dream. [Photo 2] Yet Seuls is no escapist fantasy; Mouawad constructs his alter-ego in a rigorous engagement with theatre and the history of painting by staging and inverting Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal Son. In a patricidal and ultimately vulnerable self-disclosure, Mouawad studies the breach that violence enacts between generations, language, and everyday life. As a director, playwright, and performer, Mouawad's productions in France and Quebec over the past fifteen years are among the most potent works of engaged, contemporary French-language drama going, and the artist's fierce stance as a public intellectual serves as a rallying call in defense of artistic practice in those countries. Yet, as he assumes simultaneous roles as director of French-language theatre at Canada's National Arts Center and associate artist of both the Festival d'Avignon and Espace Malraux, Mouawad has taken a strikingly soft-spoken turn, taking the stage in an intimate solo that, in the course of two hours, shakes boundaries between painting and theatre. In late 2008, the French publishers Lemeac/Actes Sud published Mouawad's notes on Seuls in creation, including paintings, research materials, and a script. Generously accompanied by Charlotte Farcet and Irene Afker's photographs of the performance, Seuls: chemin, texte et peintures is an extraordinary introduction to this artist's rigorous, intuitive process. SEULS Seuls is an unusual piece in Mouawad's repertoire. The work's title provides a key to the performance. Seul, without an s, translates in English as the singular adjective alone but Mouawad makes the word an uncommon plural (Alones). The performance's uncanny encounter between theatre and painting celebrates theatricality as a medium and sensation as a conduit for self-knowledge. It is a story of a man who loses track of himself after a war. In a deceptive detour via a pedestrian form of theatrical realism, Mouawad presents a lush, contemporary parable of a prodigal son, who, moving to a new country as a child, misrecognizes himself in another context and language. [Photo 4] The performance begins with an intentionally misleading and banal premise. In relentlessly ordinary scenes, Mouawad's alter-ego, Harwan, flounders through winter. He broods, procrastinates, and decides to paint his unwelcoming bachelor's apartment a bland white. He argues with his father, a disaffected Lebanese emigre, and struggles with writer's block. Pushed to complete his dissertation ahead of schedule, Harwan arranges to travel to Moscow to interview the director Robert Lepage on identity, the frame, and the stage. He takes a photograph for his passport in an automatic photo booth, and the stage groans and flashes with disorienting, projected self-portraits. [Photo 3] Stumbling out of the booth, Harwan receives a phone call saying his father is in a coma. In his father's hospital room, Harwan unleashes a one-sided confession of private resentments in the family drama. He recalls their flight from Lebanon during the civil war and his father's changed behavior in Montreal. He wishes aloud that when the family left, his father had thought to pack a small suitcase with childhood things, paintings, colors, and brushes. Attempting to address his father in his first language, Arabic, Harwan stumbles and fails to make complete sentences. Harwan's life falls apart as he arrives in Moscow. His luggage is missing and Lepage has already returned to Montreal, leaving a recording of his new work on Rembrandt's painting Return of the Prodigal Son. …

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