Theatre

 

From his award-winning play “Littoral” and its continuation, “Incendies,” Wajdi Mouawad frequently delivers compelling narratives surrounding family — whether it be a bereaved son navigating the complications of burying his father in his native, war-torn Lebanon like in “Littoral,” or in “Incendies,” where two siblings based in Montreal return at the request of their dead mother to their birthplace in the Middle East in search of a father and brother they’ve never met. Like a connective tissue between many of his creative works, it comes as little surprise that family also takes a focal point in his autobiographical theater series, in which war-consumed Lebanon is as much the setting as the Parisian apartment 10-year-old Mouawad’s family lived in for five years while waiting for the war’s end. “Mother,” which the director presented in 2021, echoes a diaspora that Antoine Gouki of Independent Arabia considers “Promethean torture,” and critic Alma Abu Samra in Al Akhbar writes very likely felt no different from the basement shelters with which Lebanese families living through the civil war were all-too-familiar.