Square Root of the Verb to Be
Description
Haven't we all wondered what our lives would have been like had we taken another direction? What if...? To escape the civil war devastating Lebanon in 1978, Talyani Waqar Malik's family takes the first available flight to Paris. What might have been their destinies had they fled to Rome, Houston, or Montreal, or had they stayed in Paris or Beirut?
Forty-two years after their exile, Talyani describes their lives in the week following the August 2020 explosion in the Port of Beirut from the point of view of an Italian neurosurgeon, a Parisian taxi driver, a Québécois painter, a Texan on death row, and the Lebanese owner of a blue jeans boutique, all iterations of the same man pursued by the same ghosts.
This uchronic story brings together the iconic characters from Wajdi Mouawad's Cycle domestique--father, mother, brother, and sister and the imagined descendants of Talyani, the playwright's alter ego--as well as the major themes of his dramatic universe: war and exile, rape and incest, imponderable relationships and identities, crime and redemption. An epic forty years in the making that delves into ecology, cancel culture, medically assisted dying, and the perennial question of love.
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Persons
Wajdi Mouawad spent his childhood in Lebanon, his adolescence in France, his young adult years in Québec, and he lives in France today. Since graduating from the National Theatre School of Canada in 1991, he has directed productions of contemporary and classical plays and of his own acclaimed plays and adaptations, including the quartet Le Sang des Promesses--Tideline, Scorched, Forests, and Heavens--and the cycle Domestique of Soeurs/Sisters, Mère/Mother, and Seuls. From 2000 to 2004, he was the artistic director of Théâtre de Quat'Sous in Montreal, then of the Théâtre français at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, from 2007 to 2012. In 2016 he directed Mozart's Il Seraglio for the Opéra de Lyon, and Oedipus for the Opéra de Paris in 2021. He was named Artistic Director of La Colline--théâtre national in Paris in 2016, a position he will hold until 2027. He is also the author of the novel Anima, published to great acclaim in 2012.
Linda Gaboriau is an award-winning literary translator and dramaturg based in Montreal. She has translated over 150 plays and novels from the French. Her translations of works by Quebec's most prominent playwrights have been published and produced across Canada and abroad. She has directed numerous translation residencies, and from 2002 to 2007 she was the founding director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Her drama translations have garnered many awards, including three Governor General's Literary Awards for Translation. In 2015 she was named a member of the Order of Canada, and in 2023 an Officer of l'Ordre national du Québec.