A few weeks after the Beirut performance, I phoned Mouawad. He was back in Montreal. His fears had turned out to be groundless. Spectators had been receptive to the play and to the Quebec cast. A documentary about the play that was shot at the time, Beyrouth, Littoral, featured theatregoers who had been stirred by the actors’ very foreignness. “It’s appalling that a bunch of Québécois would be talking to us about our war,” said a young woman who was both shocked and delighted.
Those were times of reconciliation and hope, and preaching remembrance was all right. Last summer, after violence again engulfed Lebanon, I wondered if Mouawad’s views had changed. Had the fighting stirred up old memories and aroused new hatreds? In an op-ed piece for Le Devoir, the Montreal daily, a true-to-form Mouawad confessed that he had walked through the night in search of the right words. “I would like to become mad, not in order to flee reality, but, on the contrary, to be able to devote myself entirely to poetry,” he wrote. “I must unearth the words since I cannot resuscitate the dead.” The word hatred, however, was not one of them. Mouawad detested being coerced into choosing between hatred and madness, an unbearable alternative in his view.
Lebanon is not at the heart of Forêts, but war is. One point of departure was a nighttime walk through the cemetery of Vagnas, a village in southern France. Mouawad stumbled on the grave of one Lucien Blondel (1856–1949), a Frenchman who had lived through the Franco- Prussian conflict of 1870 and both world wars. Mouawad had not yet written a line of Forêts but he knew that one character would be named after him.
Mouawad spent four years on the play. He read the history of French- German relations going back to Charlemagne, an emperor each country claims as its own, and delved into old science textbooks. He claims that quantum physics is an inspiration for the complex storyline in Forêts , adding that his previous plays were Newtonian in nature. Submerged in history and science, having to breathe life into more than fifty parts, writing entire scenes that he eventually cut out, Mouawad admits that Forêts was “a real forest.”
It’s 4 p.m. at the Hexagone, time for a post-mortem of last night’s performance. Mouawad is centre stage, asking the cast to sit in a circle. It is made up of one Belgian, three French, and seven Quebec actors (who can switch accents effortlessly and, for most, flawlessly). Placid as ever, Mouawad believes some fine-tuning is in order. He asks Linda Laplante to pay more attention to her elocution. He would like her to sound slightly less naturalistic in order to highlight the souffle littéraire, the literary nature of the text. He finds MarieÈve Perron’s final monologue a little too subdued. “It’s a catharsis,” he tells her. “Don’t hold anything back. Open up your voice. Your other monologues are full of anger. Not this one. It’s as if you were speaking to someone on the other side of a noisy river.” This simile is apparently too weak, so Mouawad finds a metaphor. “You’re speaking to the stars.”
By any standard, the preparation for Forêts, which began in the spring of 2005, was intense and impressive. Mouawad discussed the storyline with his actors for six weeks. In the fall, when rehearsals began, he had written only three of the play’s seven acts. He directed by day and wrote by night. Theatres in France and Canada had signed up for 130 performances, some of which were already sold out, and he was on deadline. Actress Anne- Marie Olivier calculates that by opening night the cast had rehearsed for 600 hours, five times longer than the plays she usually works on.
Forêts was rehearsed not in Montreal but rather in two somewhat remote French towns, Aubusson and Saint-Nazaire. This augmented Mouawad’s feeling of total immersion. Never turning the television on, never having to worry about cooking or laundry, Mouawad did nothing but work. Was it too much? “One never creates too much,” he says. “One never loves too much. One creates or one doesn’t. One loves or one doesn’t. Does one go on love breaks? ‘Sorry, dear, I’ve loved you for eight consecutive weeks now, I have to recharge my battery.’ ”
In some ways, Forêts is quintessentially Québécois. Mouawad has a deep, heartfelt understanding of a society he both loves and reproves. The play recalls, for instance, that many French Canadians used to mutilate their children by pulling out their teeth. Mouawad uses this barbaric yet once widespread practice as a metaphor for the silence of the Québécois. “Who needs teeth in a country where one speaks so little? ” laments inconsolable Luce Brouillard as she gazes at the St. Lawrence River, its water carrying the tears of “a people who can no longer cry.” Her name, derived from “light” (lux in Latin) and “fog” (brouillard in French), is reminiscent of Hitler’s 1941 directive, Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog), under which opponents were sent to concentration camps.
Even though he was already fourteen when he moved to Quebec, Mouawad has an ear for Québécois French, both shouted and hushed. He regrets that the Québécois use words merely as utilitarian tools. “It’s as if their purpose in life were to make as little noise as possible,” he says. And why would the St. Lawrence carry their tears? “It’s as if the entire pays were waiting for something that had already passed it by,” he ventures. It’s only an intuition, he cautions. At times even this oracle is unsure of what he seems to be saying.
At a more fundamental level, Forêts is not about Quebec at all. It is an ode to friendship, a hymn to the triumph of companionship over kinship. The play raises pointed questions about blood ties and takes aim at those obsessed by family, clan, tribe, and nation. There are echoes of Hannah Arendt when one character asks: “Why is it that those who want to save us end up sacrificing us? ”
