"Scorched' at the Wilma

It takes a village to raise a child, the liberal Hillary Clinton famously observed in the '90s. No it doesn't, the conservative Elizabeth Dole replied: It takes a family. Whatever— liberals and conservatives alike can agree that families and villages are vital institutions. But here's the rub: In order to survive, both must impose restraints on their individual members.

So what happens when a loving young couple conceives a child against the wishes of their families or their village? And what consequences are set in motion when, for the good of the family or village, the young father is banished and the infant is taken from its mother at birth and given away?

The family or village may survive for the moment. But suppose the abandoned baby— lacking a family or village to nurture him— grows up to become Pol Pot or Idi Amin or Hitler? What happens to families and villages then?

This is more or less the philosophical quandary posed by Scorched, Wajdi Mouawad's often brilliant meditation on the seemingly endless cycle of ethnic and civil warfare in what we used to call "traditional" societies. Mouawad's own family fled Lebanon during that country's civil war in the '70s, when he was still a child, and Scorched focuses on the suffering that war inflicts on mothers and children— whose anger is then inflicted on succeeding generations.

A web of anger for the ages

His prism is a mother and her twin children, now in their 20s, who've fled a generic "traditional" country (Lebanon? Cambodia? Sudan? Bosnia?) for refuge in a generic modern Western country (presumably the U.S. or Canada). Theirs is a family "caught in a web of anger for ages": Nawal, the mother, hasn't spoken to her kids, or anyone else, for five years. Simon, her son (Ariel Shafir), is an amateur boxer who takes out his aggressions in the ring. Janine (Leila Buck) is a mathematician drawn to "insoluble problems that will lead to other problems equally insoluble."

Simon and Janine know nothing about their background or their mother's history; to them she is just a pain in the neck, and when the play begins she has compounded their aggravation by dying and leaving them a set of seemingly nonsensical demands. It soon develops, of course, that the seemingly useless Nawal was "someone who was someone nevertheless," in the words of the notary who delivers her last testament (Benjamin Lloyd). Given what she's been through, everything Nawal has said or done makes eminently good sense, including her five-year silence: Nawal is a woman who has been rendered speechless by the unspeakable.

The twins' subsequent quest to fulfill their mother's demands and discover their origins occupies the rest of the play, and at least for the first act Scorched is as engaging a work of theater as you could hope to find. Mouawad's script is razor-sharp (with an excellent translation by Linda Gaboriau) and exquisitely structured, using flashbacks and flash-forwards to create a sense that time, location and identity have all been blurred by the fog of anger and violence. We see Nawal as a joyous teenage girl (played by Aadya Bedi); before we know it, she is a gaunt refugee in her 40s (Jacqueline Antaramian), searching hopelessly for her child through a world gone mad; and ultimately we see her in her 60s, a thoroughly hardened woman (Janis Dardaris), testifying with bitter dignity at a war crimes trial.

Here we have the Wilma Theater doing what the Wilma Theater does best: Finding a first-rate script that addresses cosmic issues, and coordinating imagination, a large and talented cast (I especially enjoyed the versatility of Omar Koury in six different roles, from a doctor to a janitor to a war photographer to a village elder) and no-nonsense direction by Blanka Zizka to produce a performance that dazzles the intellect, if not necessarily the heart or soul.

A fog that's a bit too foggy

Unfortunately, in the second act, the fog of Mouawad's war got just a bit too foggy for me. Seven of the nine actors in the cast play multiple roles, and of course Nawal is portrayed by three different women at three different ages. Ariel Shafir, who plays Simon, also plays Simon's grandfather as a young man. Simon and Janine each have two names— one Western and one from Nawal's old country— which are used interchangeably. Also, the script refers constantly to characters whose names— like Nawal, Wahab, Jihane, Elhame, Sawda and Nihad— are gender-neutral (at least to these Western ears of mine).

I found myself wishing I had a scorecard, as at a ball game. Thank God for the actors' photos in the program— that's the only way I could figure out afterward (as Mel Brooks would have put it) "who was ladies and who was fellas."

To be sure, much of this confusion is deliberate. Mouawad's overriding point is the futility of revenge and retribution as a solution for aggression and war; also that we are doomed to repeat the behaviors of our parents (and consequently surrender our own individuality) unless we can break the cycle. And if we in the audience can't figure out who started this cycle of violence, Mouawad says in effect, maybe we'll ask better questions, such as: How can we cure it?

But just as the full impact of Mouawad's message should have been dawning on me, I found myself preoccupied with the minor housekeeping challenge of figuring out exactly who was who. At the play's climactic moment— when Simon and Janine discover the unspeakable identity of their brother and their father— I was busy wondering, "Now, wait a minute— is "'The woman who sings' Nawal or her companion? Is there an instant replay button I can hit?"

When the Jews fought back

Probably the most electric moment I ever experienced in a theater occurred in the early '60s, at the Broadway production of The Wall, John Hersey's drama about the Warsaw ghetto revolt. Its first act consisted largely of a series of escalating anti-Semitic abuses and humiliations committed by Nazi storm troopers, paralleled by the Jews' terrible realization that they must somehow stand up to their tormentors. At the climax of the act, an SS officer kicked in the door of a Jewish home, disappeared inside, a shot rang out… and a moment later he staggered into the street, fatally wounded, crying out to his fellow storm troopers in astonishment: "The Jews are fighting back!"

The ferocious and deafening burst of applause that greeted those words was more than cathartic; it was downright frightening. I half expected that well-dressed and middle-aged (and, to be sure, heavily Jewish) audience to storm the stage and pummel the Nazi actor themselves. It was manipulative theater, to be sure; but what theater!

When a similar moment of courageous defiance occurred in Scorched, it was greeted with absolute silence (at least on opening night). That happened, no doubt, because Mouawad has taken care not to manipulate his audience or to extol retaliation. He speaks to our reason and our intellect rather than to our emotions, which is all to the good. Scorched is an intelligent reflection on the nature of war by one who has been deeply scarred by it. Whether audiences will still be moved to tears when they think of it 50 years from now, as I am by the memory of The Wall— that's another question.



To read a response, click here.