"Wedding Day among the Cro-Magnons": Wajdi Mouawad explores the archaeology of a family at war

To stage a play that you wrote more than thirty years ago is courageous, and it gives you the opportunity to be furious, annoyed, moved, compassionate, towards this stranger that you may have been, and who, exiled in Canada with his family, spent his adolescence wondering what he was doing in this icy country asleep in the snow, rather than under the bomb storms of Beirut. This man who revisits the person he was in the language he lost, Arabic, is Wajdi Mouawad and the play with the eloquent title, Journée de noces chez les Cromagnons, is the first that he wrote in Canada, a bruised young man.

So here it is in Paris, on the plateau of La Colline, performed in Arabic by partly Lebanese actors. As you may recall, this play was supposed to premiere in Lebanon on April 30, 2024, at the Le Monnot theater in Beirut. It had to be canceled due to "serious pressure and threats against certain artists, technicians, and the theater" made by activists, according to the theater's director. In a country where, since 1955, it has been forbidden to have contact with Israelis