There are a dozen actors and one star in the new Masrah al-Madina musical, Long was the Night at the Gates of the Embassy by Issa Makhlouf and Nidal al-Ashkar. Performed in Arabic, the ensemble features a potpourri of 20-somethings - some novices and some who have already graced stage and screen - who represent the tribulations of Lebanon’s Generation Y, the youngsters growing up in the 1990s and 2000s.
Sukleen barrels and a flute solo
At the play’s opening, a backdrop of urban Beirut towers over the vast stage littered with blockades, barricades and rusty Sukleen barrels. The musical begins with a gloomy, andante march of the actors. They are at the gates of an unnamed embassy and have been waiting for weeks, months or years for their emigration visas. Left forever in limbo, they stand at the mercy of the embassy guard who, as he calls out ticket numbers, marks their interminable malaise. The solace of a soft flute underscores the scene, a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel.
There are reports of gunfire in the city, so they, “can’t get into the embassy nor can we go back home,” someone protests. Stuck on the doorstep of utopia, they have nothing but their anger and each other. When the guard announces closing time, the frustration of the ensemble explodes into a high-octane Stomp act. A dude in a keffiyeh and argyle vest bangs on the roadblock, and a young woman in a white vintage dress kicks at the barrels with her boots. The tools of state control become instruments of hopeless rage in this riveting moment.
The success of the piece is, however, short-lived, and the rest of the musical is weighed down by sour acting and banal representations. The play attempts to tackle the experience and history of emigration from Lebanon, an urgent subject in the wake of the 2006 July War and the more recent civil conflict. The text explores Generation Y’s naïve idealization of the promised land – New York, Australia or the Gulf – and the absurdity of the sectarian tensions that push people to leave. The denouement turns to archives of the past, which reveal that the actual experience of the émigrés is one of continued struggle, far from the rosy expectations of Generation Y. The lesson is learned from the wise elders, and the company members, newly empowered and ready to confront the challenges that lie ahead, resolve to fulfill their dreams of emigration.
Slices of life, with extra cheese
Episodic in structure, the play’s vignettes often fall victim to cliché, cheap laughs, or, worst of all, cheesy romance. For instance, the love story between Zeina (Nada Bou Farhat) and Khaled (Abd Kobeissi) is supposed to serve as the primary narrative thread in the otherwise nonlinear sequence of scenes. The two lovers are both from the same sect and presumably headed toward marriage, but the dissatisfied Zeina decides to emigrate to Paris to be with a former lover from a different sect.
Farhat and Kobeissi’s performances are clumsy and flat, and they have absolutely zero chemistry. Farhat counts on her striking feline look and gets substantially more face time with the audience than Kobeissi, who is left in the cold. This weakness of their performance is unfortunate because we return to the love story three times throughout the course of the production. Instead of serving as characters we are excited to revisit, each return is more painful than its predecessor.
Sleek chorus
It is the tender cooing of the one-woman-chorus (Nisserine Hmeidan) that holds Embassy together. She sings with finesse and a warm confidence, in marked contrast to her colleagues’ demonstrative acting that, with so much screaming, leaves the audience almost embarrassed. “Take me away from here so that I can die,” Hmeidan chants as the poetic image of a migrating sea turtle bearing a baobab tree ebbs and flows on the backdrop of stage. She brings sincere pathos to the piece and braves the temptation of easy nostalgia.
Old vs. young, faithless vs. faith
On the surface, Embassy is a meditation on boundaries – geographic, sectarian and cultural – and the will to transcend them. It presents Ashkar and Makhlouf’s imagining of the hopes and discontents of young adults today. What is most striking about Embassy is how it functions as a requiem for generational solidarity.
Ashkar, who also directed the piece, is a public figure, theater impresario, and founder of Masrah al-Madina. She has played a pioneering role in Beirut theater for more than 40 years, has performed and produced plays throughout the Arab Middle East and Europe and recently directed To Hell with Meryl Streep, an adaptation of the novel by Lebanese-born Rachid al-Daif, in Beirut and in Paris.
On the opening night, the audience primarily consisted of people at least 30 years older than the actors. Surely, it was Ashkar herself who drew these unsuspecting spectators who are, in some way, responsible and accountable for the distress of the characters, for many of the problems of the nation-state of Lebanon were left unresolved by the citizens of yesterday. A ravine separated this audience from Generation Y on the stage. While they were not physically represented in the world of Embassy, their shadow was latent – after all, it is Ashkar, their compatriot in age, who is behind the production.
“We aren’t living together,” Zeina laments. Who is this “we?” Maronites, Shia and Sunnis? While the play would have us believe the obvious – that the most severe social divides are along sectarian lines, the moment of performance revealed that it is in fact the old and the young who aren’t living together, so much so that each is absent from the other’s idea of community. In this implicit circumstance lie the depth and cultural value of Ashkar’s production, which, despite its serious artistic shortcomings, acknowledges and confronts this most serious social bifurcation.
Long was the Night at the Gates of the Embassy is at Masrah Al Madina, Saroulla Building, Hamra
8.30pm Thursday – Sunday, until December 31
Telephone: 01 753 010