Before a packed audience of artists, media figures, cultural personalities, and
representatives of television, radio, print, and digital press, Al Wa7esh
opened at Théâtre Le Monnot with a special preview performance led by
the magnetic presence of Carole Abboud and Dory Al Samarany.
Directed by Jacques Maroun, the production brings to Beirut John
Patrick Shanley’s celebrated Danny
and the Deep Blue Sea in an Lebanese-Arabic translation by Arze
Khodr. At the center of this Lebanese staging lies the volatile encounter
between its two performers: an emotionally exposed duet carried by tension,
rupture, tenderness, and the fragile possibility of connection.
The play follows Roberta and Danny, two wounded outsiders who
meet one night in a nearly empty bar. Both arrive armed with fear, anger, and
years of buried pain. What begins as confrontation slowly shifts into
confession, as two people seemingly incapable of tenderness begin, cautiously and
awkwardly, to recognize themselves in one another.
Abboud gives Roberta a presence that is at once bruised and defiant,
moving seamlessly between vulnerability and control, exhaustion and instinct.
Opposite her, Al Samarany brings Danny a raw, restless energy, shaping
him less as a brute than as a man desperately shielding himself from collapse.
Together, they create a stage relationship built on silences, eruptions,
hesitation, humor, and need.
Rather than treating Danny and the Deep Blue Sea as a distant
American text, Al Wa7esh draws Shanley’s world into a distinctly
Lebanese emotional landscape. Under Maroun’s direction, the play becomes less
about geography than recognition: the familiar sight of people living at the
margins of themselves, struggling to name their wounds while reaching, however
clumsily, toward grace.
The return of Al Wa7esh to the stage also carries particular
resonance. The production was first presented in 2019 at Maroun’s artistic
workshop before Lebanon’s successive crises interrupted its path toward a wider
audience. Its opening at Théâtre Le Monnot now marks not simply a
revival, but the continuation of a theatrical journey long left suspended.
Shanley, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Moonstruck and
Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright of Doubt: A Parable,
remains one of the defining voices of contemporary American theatre and cinema.
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is a compact, unforgiving work that
leaves little room for ornament or evasion, placing extraordinary demands on
its performers.
Since its first presentation, Al Wa7esh has drawn attention for
the intensity of its lead performances and for its ability to transform an
international text into something immediate and locally resonant. In its new
run at Théâtre Le Monnot, that force is carried above all by Abboud
and Al Samarany, whose performances place audiences face-to-face with fear,
rage, humor, longing, and the uneasy hope of redemption.
Written by John Patrick Shanley, translated by Arze Khodr,
produced and directed by Jacques Maroun, and starring Carole Abboud
and Dory Al Samarany, Al Wa7esh is now playing at Théâtre
Le Monnot.
