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Thirty years after writing it, Wajdi Mouawad is finally staging Journée de noces chez les Cromagnons (Wedding Day at the Cro-Magnons), a foundational piece of his theatrical universe, with a Lebanese team and in his mother tongue.
In 1991, the young Canadian-Lebanese author Wajdi Mouawad wrote Journée de noces chez les Cromagnons, a tragicomic play that tells the story of a family determined to prepare for the wedding of their eldest daughter amidst bombings to a fiancé… who does not exist. “It’s silly to say, but preparing a wedding under machine gun fire is not an easy task,” the author notes with irony in his preface. This text already contains the seeds of his entire theatrical universe, showing that the war between life and death is a merciless, all-out struggle.
However, the initial idea was quite different. Wajdi Mouawad initially wanted to write about Franz Kafka preparing for his marriage under the mocking gaze of his father. But as he wrote, memories of the Lebanese civil war resurfaced. “Why, writing about Kafka, did the idea of dropping bombs keep coming to me?” he wonders. From this “contortion,” an essential play was born that allowed him to “bring together worlds that were violently separated: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.”
First created in 1994 in Quebec in a revised version to make it more “comprehensible,” the play could not then achieve its original writing rhythm. Thirty years later, Wajdi Mouawad feels the need to return to it, to stage it himself in its original essence and in his mother tongue. This desire was fueled by the impactful experience of Mother in 2021, his first play performed in Arabic by Lebanese actresses, which gave him the feeling of being “untranslated,” revealing his true writing.
Hearing his words as he had envisioned them, naturally carried by performers who share a similar experience and memory, made him realize that he has “always written in Arabic,” as if the “varnish of French that veiled the language” had been removed. Beyond time, the concerns of the play also strangely resonate with those of Lebanon today. Hence the necessity to recreate Journée de noces with a Lebanese artistic team, on this territory to which Wajdi Mouawad remains viscerally connected. He, who considers himself Lebanese and not of Lebanese origin and has never stopped thinking and speaking of a Lebanon omnipresent in his work. After presenting several of his key plays there, he returns with this foundational text, translated by Odette Makhlouf.
Surrounded by designers from his former companies and La Colline, which he directs today, as well as Lebanese collaborators, he aims to foster exchanges and cooperation. To finally give voice to this original cry, this urgent and poetic speech that speaks of the war between life and death. And to “tear himself away from the grudge that his parents’ world has nurtured,” because “the misfortune of living already belongs to each individual from the first moment of their birth.”
The text has evolved over the years, leading to multiple layered versions, but none without the parents, the swearing, the father’s verbal violence, or the dishes to prepare. “It seems that an exile of forty years is transforming into an odyssey,” notes Wajdi Mouawad. An odyssey back to the origins that he wishes to complete by staging the play himself in its initial rhythm and his mother tongue. To fully reveal this writing that has never ceased to speak of Lebanon.
A Lebanon torn by war, but where life stubbornly persists against all odds, like this family preparing an impossible wedding. A country that Wajdi Mouawad carries within him and tirelessly questions, to “participate in the general movement that will inspire the arrow” of time, “so that the target it invents during its course is prodigiously magical and light as childhood.” Journée de noces chez les Cromagnons (Wedding Day at the Cro-Magnons) is undoubtedly the first spark.
From April 30 to May 19 at the Le Monnot Theater
Tickets on sale at Antoine Ticketing
