Scene Change

Eight years after leaving Canada behind, playwright Wajdi Mouawad is back with a shattering production

- Dimitri Nasrallah

In 1518, Hassan Ibn Mohammed Al-Wazzan, a Moroccan ambassador, was captured at sea by Christian pirates. Soon after, the story goes, the pirates realized the value of their prisoner and delivered him to Pope Leo X. The pope was taken by Al- Wazzan’s intellect, and he made the diplomat an offer: convert, and he could have his freedom back. Al-Wazzan’s allegiance was to scholarship, not politics or religion, and he accepted. He lived out much of his life in Italy as Joannes Leo Africanus and wrote numerous popular books. By the seventeenth century, Al-Wazzan was considered one of the most authoritative scholars on Africa.

This obscure figure in diplomatic history has come back to life as a character in — and inspiration for — Tous des oiseaux, the latest play written and directed by Wajdi Mouawad. The Lebanese Canadian playwright is perhaps best known to general audiences as the creator of Incendies, his critically acclaimed play about two Montreal siblings and their journey to

the Middle East (it was later made into an Academy Award–nominated film by another top Québécois cultural export, Denis Villeneuve). But over the past three decades and across his body of more than twenty plays, Mouawad has emerged as a singular talent in the theatre world, a war afflicted existentialist who articulates an Arab interiority that’s rarely been seen on Western stages.