Here and Now

The Moroccan Ministry of Culture, which houses the Institute of Dramatic Arts and Film Animation as well as the Institute of Archeology (a fitting combination if I’ve ever seen one…), is set back from a winding road on the outskirts of Rabat, surrounded by the skeletons of buildings that have been abandoned in the process of (de)construction. I was told on the taxi ride to the Ministry today that it was a good thing we (two Moroccan friends and myself) did not take the bus. We would have never gotten there. We did though, and good thing too, because we brought the drums. Today, Daha Wassa, a Moroccan theater company founded by young artists associated with the Institute of Dramatic Arts, performed their production called “Trois nuits avec Madox” in the basement of the Ministry. The room was small and cold. The cement walls were painted in bold colors, the shadows of dancers in bold black strokes along the front wall and Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald along the back. The house was an extension of the stage, consisting of twenty or so folding chairs and several light-blue wooden benches along the edges of the room. A bench ran across the back wall such that the players were completely surrounded by the audience, all of whom were on their level. Horizontal theater. The set included a small table, a few shots glasses, several bottles of alcohol, three chairs and a bar. The people sitting on the back bench could, if feeling particularly disruptive, reach out with their feet and knock over the table.

The play was a little over an hour long and was entirely in Moroccan Arabic. Of which I understand nothing. Armed with just a brief plot outline and my senses, I sat down. As the play progressed, I experienced in miniature what I can only assume happens to the deaf. With the loss of verbal comprehension, my other senses sharpened. I couldn’t understand the words, but I could understand the sound of liquid being poured into a glass, the smell of the cigarette smoke, and the dynamism with which the actors moved about the stage. The sound effects were my favorite part of the evening. For rain, a woman seated on the back bench poured tiny pebbles from one large plastic bottle into another. The wind was a low whistle from a source I could not locate. A man carrying a large metal sheet covered with pieces of packaging tape of varying size created thunder. When they were not on stage, the actors sat in the first row of the seats, as part of the audience. I was delighted by the fluidity with which they transitioned from audience member to player, at one moment laughing at the taxi driver who flailed around like Kramer from Seinfeld and the next having water violently splashed in their face by the woman with a water bottle simulating rain as they entered the bar.

When the play drew to an end, three men at various points in the room began to play the drums, including the ones we have placed in the back of the taxi. In lieu of a curtain call, the five actors danced back on stage and proceeded to grab audience members at random until two thirds of the house was jamming to the sound of drums and laughter. It was this incorporation of the audience into the company combined with the audience itself – funky art students with crazy hair and lots of oversized jewelry – and the plot of the show – a story of five strangers united by suspicion, confusion, disbelief, and an ultimate acceptance of the volatility of reality – that reminded me why I love this kind of immediate, actual theater. Daha Wassa, when translated from Dareeja, means Here and Now. And that’s how I felt tonight. Without being able to understand a word, I was seamlessly incorporated into a here and now that was a construct of both the actors on stage and the audience members laughing on both sides of me.