Wajdi Mouawad is at war. And so are you. That's his slogan for his first season as artistic director of the National Arts Centre's French-language theatre: Nous sommes en guerre.
"It's an invitation to be awake, to be active," says Mouawad, who unveiled his artistic call to arms yesterday in Ottawa. "We can change things; it is never too late. We are at war."
Mouawad's opening shot is a loud and resonant one. Whether it's by staging plays that aren't in French at the French theatre, or having actors read out the FLQ manifesto at a Crown corporation, there's something on his program to startle everyone.
For the quiet but intense playwright/director, theatre is the ultimate battlefield. "If you're at the cinema watching Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart, he will always kill the bad guy at the end," says Mouawad, 39, interviewed in French in the NAC's concrete fortress. "At the theatre, however, anything can happen. The actors are in a state of battle all the time."
Mouawad's current career couldn't be hotter if he were staging theatre on the sun, with productions mounted from Ireland to Mexico. Scorched, the English translation of his hit Incendies, is about to go on a cross-Canada tour, while three of his plays - Forêts, Incendies and Seuls - are touring through Europe.
And so, to many of his friends in Montreal, his decision to take the reins at the NAC last year was a shock.
"They mocked, said I was becoming a bureaucrat," says Mouawad, peering out from behind his tiny, professorial glasses. "There's a lot of ignorance about what this place is. It was an offer I couldn't refuse."
At first, however, Mouawad did refuse. After all, he had given up being artistic director at Montreal's Théâtre de Quat'Sous in 2004 to devote more time to his art.
But he was swayed by NAC president Peter Herrndorf. "He understands that an artist is something dangerous, not a little dog on a leash," says the soft-spoken Mouawad, dressed in a yellow sweater that reads "Deer me" and features a picture of a half-woman, half-deer. "An artist is an animal that can jump at your throat just when he seemed calm."
Most importantly, Herrndorf promised that Mouawad's NAC work would not impede his ability to continue to develop his work in France, where he and his dramaturge/partner Charlotte are now mostly based. Every 1½ months, Mouawad returns to Ottawa for a week.
But lest you think his is a part-time job, Mouawad's stamp is all over the new season, right down to the pictures he personally selected for the brochure. Rather than planning a themed season, he has simply invited artists whom he admires to Ottawa, including Robert Lepage, veteran Quebec director André Brassard, the innovative Marie Brassard (no relation) and acclaimed Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski. "They are artists who light people on fire," he says.
For Mouawad, it was Kafka's The Metamorphosis that set him on fire when he was 15. No wonder: By that age, he had undergone a transmogrification as radical as Gregor Samsa's. Born in Lebanon in 1968, civil war broke out when he was just 7. His family immigrated to France, then to Montreal a few years later. He metamorphosed from an Arabic to a French speaker during that time.
This goes some way toward explaining why Mouawad has shattered the French theatre's mandate by inviting Warlikowski to direct Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin's Krum in Polish (with English and French surtitles). It's the first time in the NAC's 40-year history the French-language theatre has presented a show not in the French language.
Mouawad now plans to program a foreign-language production every year. "Polish can be French too, if we want," he says, in one of his enigmatic, poetic sentences that always sound better spoken in French.
As for the FLQ manifesto, it will be read on stage as part of the first event of the year: Manifeste! Planned to mark the 40th anniversary of 1968 (incidentally, the year Mouawad was born), it will feature artists reading many historical manifestos and writing new ones.
The real draws of Mouawad's first season, however, are his two new plays - his solo work Seuls, which opens with him nearly naked (hello Ottawa!) and Le soleil ni la mort ne peuvent se regarder dans la face, set in Ancient Thebes. Both commissions from theatres in France, the latter will be presented exclusively in North America in Ottawa.
Mouawad will be travelling around Canada too. There are three franco-Canadian writers in residence this year - from Ontario, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick - and Mouawad will travel to their homes to work with them. "This is a way for me to discover the country; I don't know it very well," he says.
And so, while some artists take artistic-director positions to finally settle down, for Mouawad, Ottawa is just another stop in his nomadic existence. "I like that a lot," he says with a beguiling smile. "This continual change of universe is something that makes me very happy."
J. Kelly Nestruck