October 28, 2010
By Lawrence Bommer
Steadstyle Chicago

It’s hard to imagine a more urgent or appropriate work for Silk Road Theatre Project to produce or perform than this award-winning, aptly named “Scorched.” For a theater dedicated to exploring dramas by playwrights of Asian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean backgrounds, this engrossing work by Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad equals a mission statement.

Combining the shock effects and the inevitability of Sophocles (especially “Oedius Rex”) with the forensic intensity of a detective story, it centers on two siblings and their quest for identity, a journey that takes them from French Canadian security to a Lebanese civil war that took 100,000 lives. The audience goes even deeper--into a treacherous world of self-fulfilling hate, cyclical warfare, and occasional, near-redemptive eruptions of love.

Mouawad is careful to name names but not places. We’re not to dismiss this story as just another expose of Third World dysfunction or kneejerk bigotry. We’re to imagine how we’d feel to be Janine (Lacy Katherine Campbell) and Simon (Nick Cimino), a math teacher and a boxer, suddenly summoned in 2002 by the will of a mother who mysteriously hasn’t spoken in five years but who has become famous as the former political prisoner called “the woman who sings.”

But Nawal speaks after death: The kindly notary who is executor to her estate (affable Fredric Stone) presents two envelopes which the 22-year-old twins are required to present to their lost father and brother, still in Lebanon, before they can be allowed to properly bury their mother and inscribe her name on a memorial stone.

This strange request sets them off, reluctantly then compulsively, on a quest for the truth behind their mother’s silence and their own origins. The 165-minute trek takes us deep into the byways of Lebanon’s rock-built villages, where ancient hatreds still work themselves out in conflicts between Christian Phalangists, Hezbollah Muslims, invading Israelis, and, most trenchantly, the Palestinian refugees, permanently displaced persons who have trapped in camps for over 60 years and still long to return to their homeland. This is the killing ground for Lebanon’s worst atrocities—and the author knows what he writes about, having witnessed at the age of six a bus attacked by terrorists who massacred all the civilians. No wonder he repeatedly alludes to childhood as “a knife that remains struck in your throat.”

The playwright describes his work as rooted “above all else by poetry, detached from its political context and instead anchored in the politic of human suffering, the poetry which unites us all.” Here, despite a plot that sometimes defies probability and belief as it pursues cunning and cruel connections, the author succeeds magnificently. We’re inexorably drawn into this web, reeling from revelations that show just how closely love and hate manage to set each other in every sense. The only drawback is the novelistic length of this multi-textured work--but isn’t that just another way of citing the playwright’s sheer storytelling generosity?

The love here belongs to the women who seem the only creatures willing to “break the thread” of fear and rage that ravages the Middle East. It takes three (Diana Simonzadeh, Carolyn Hoerdemann, and Astra Asdou) to play this very complex (and legendary) mother Nawal who is memorably joined by her freedom fighting companion (Fawzia Mirza). With dignity, patience, resignation and resilience they incarnate the life force amid so much death. The last is horrifically represented most trenchantly by Nawal’s terrorist son (Adam Poss), an unrepentant sniper who embodies all the hard hate of centuries of mindless warfare.

Effectively presented through multiple time frames and nonlinear action, the plot unspools like a curse that spares neither innocents nor killers. The audience itself seems caught in the crossfire that detonates Dale Heinen’s Chicago premiere until detachment becomes impossible.