EAST/WEST

A Trilogy of Texts for the Theater

PART I

Napoléon en Egypte

EAST/WEST is a compendium of texts which theatrically interrogate the schismatic dynamic of dominion and allure as it occurs between the Arabs of the East and the Europeans/Americans of the West during the course of the previous millenium.

The directive is two-fold: to unearth exacting historical fact as well as accurate cultural circumstance...and then to detonate those discoveries within a compelling and sound artistic paradigm.

In the early 1920s, Ameen Rihani wrote, "The peace of the world at large will depend wholly upon peace in the Middle East." It is the position of SHESHBESH that any measure of peace relies upon the banishment of ignorance. That act demands inquiry. The objective of this trilogy is to engage the audience with a series of historically informed puzzles, designed to entertain, to enrapture and to explode the barriers between the known and the unknown, yesterday and tomorrow, East and West.

Napoléon en Egypte is a theatrical bonfire, a meditation on the grave political parallels between the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 and, by simple implication, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

From imperialistic hunger and global domination, through the "selling" of the war to the French people, to the ignorance of cultural variances that ultimately engendered the catastrophic demise of the enterprise, the concurrent trajectories between the French and American invasions are precise, shocking and revelatory.

Theatrically, the play employs a cross-historical method to create a muscular vocabulary for the ideas. Media which did not actually exist within the culture figure prominently within the structure of the play. Multiple languages are utilized to illuminate as well as scramble the sensibilities of the audience, to encapsulate our global proximities.

At the core of the play is the character of Napoleon, in whose personal struggle is embodied the larger geopolitical one, between the known and the unknown, science and spirit, industry and repose, West and East. Napoleon himself considered his failure in Egypt as the greatest misstep of his career, eventhough it predated his meteoric rise and ultimate impact on Western culture. As he famously stated, "All glory resides in the East."

By positioning the war within Napoleon as the true dramatic engine of the play, the war between the East and the West of his soul, between the masculine and the feminine, intuition and pragmatism, the Self versus the Other, the play avoids mere documentary and historical rehash to achieve an artistic, poetic dimension as well as a startling spiritual resonance.

PART II

Al Mahjar

(The Immigrant)

During the first great wave of immigration to America from the Middle East, the years 1880 - 1920, three distinct voices arose: all Lebanese, all poets, all living in New York in the years leading up to and following World War I. These three men, Kahlil Gibran, Ameen Rihani, and Mikhail Naimy, exploiting the media of their own time, writing in both Arabic and English, in both Eastern as well as Western modalities, generated the great revival of Arabic Literature that continues to this day. Each of them addresses in his work the chasm they straddled and expresses the euphoric potential inherent in a new identity: an Arab-American, a child of both East and West, a citizen of the world.

Heavily influenced by the American Transcendentalists, including Emerson, Thoreau, and later Whitman, this trinity of Gibran, Rihani and Naimy are still revered in the East as the fathers of Modern Arabic Literature and Thought...and eventhough their works are startlingly prescient and immediately relevant perspectives on our contemporary world, they are all but forgotten in the West.

Kahlil Gibran

Ameen Rihani

Mikhail Naimy

Within the 40-year span these men spent living in New York City, the very character of America's relationship with the Middle East endured a hopeful birth, suffered a devastating loss, and ultimately entered into a state of willful ignorance and bitter resentment which continues to this day.

Al Mahjar is , however, neither diatribe nor indictment. It is a romance which explodes at the nexus of East and West, of liberty and oppression, of capitalism and contemplation. The text encompasses the First World War, Arab Nationalism, American Transcendentalism, the impact of Zionism and the fate of Palestine. It is a struggle between the personal and the political, the Artist and the Worker, Christianity vs. Islam. As a romance, it features a score of early American Standards, sung by a smoky jazz jinni in a metropolis fueled by lust and drink and throbbing, incessant movement. It is the song of the desert in the city of skyscrapers.

PART III

Motor City

The final play in the East/West triptych considers the world since 1920, including the great oil boom, the disharmonious presence of the United States in the Middle East, the roaring dominance of technology, and the corrupting allure of power. It is a wild communion of energies, kinetic and insistent:

Automobiles, airplanes, drilling, production, motion, speed, travel, shipping, buying, selling, pricing, trading, flying, changing, improving, oil, gas, light, sound, pictures, barrels, buildings, jewels, furs, markets, funds, investments, wheeling, dealing and reeling.

Al Mahjar has been the recipient of a development grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation.

Motor City is concerned with the sexual status of the car, the rise of OPEC, the second and third waves of immigration to the United States as well as the swollen Arab population of Detroit (ironically, America's hub of automobile production), television, radio, the movies and the internet, the rise of religious fundamentalism in the West as well as the East, identity, caricature, consumerism and culture.

At the heart of this final text in the trilogy is the following conundrum: In a world in which there exists the greatest potential for mass communication and distribution of information...how can we remain so ignorant of the world around us, so very ill-informed? Motor City, (though still in the research, postulation and development phase) promises to be a hall of mirrors, a slippery and speedy funhouse ride of illusion and deception, where the truth is difficult to discern and a trickster, a huckster lies in wait around every corner, eager to steal not only your money...but perhaps, your very soul.

To inquire as to how you may support EAST/WEST , in whole or in part,

please visit the "Support & Funding" page

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