Review: In ‘While I Was Waiting,’ a Man and a Country in Limbo

Political theater, with its tendency toward hectoring and grandiosity, is hard to credit these days. After all, both politics and theater have been with us for centuries, barely making an inch of difference in the tide of human brutality. “While I Was Waiting,” a subtly harrowing play by Mohammad Al Attar that opened on Wednesday in a Lincoln Center Festival production, gets around the problem by embracing failure as its central subject: the failure of government, yes, but also of resistance. As a character named Omar says, “How can nothing have changed, after all that happened?”

Omar is referring specifically to the aftermath of the attempted peaceful revolution in Syria during the Arab Spring of 2011. Nearly half a million have so far died in the ensuing civil war, yet President Bashar al-Assad remains in power. That sense of stasis despite enormous disruption is what gives Mr. Al Attar’s play its convincing bite, as does the almost entirely Syrian cast and creative team, some of them refugees. (The production originated in Europe.) “While I Was Waiting,” as its title suggests, is about the oxymoron of permanent crisis, in which ordinary characters face ordinary problems in a world gone mortally absurd.

I say characters, but only some of them really are. Omar (Mustafa Kur) is more of a ghost, having “entered limbo” while incarcerated by the government in 2014. We are never quite sure whether he is dead or in a fugue state or is just a theatrical construct. He lives above the main action of the play on an elevated platform, speaking into a microphone and operating what appears to be a soundboard. Up there with him most of the time is his pal, and the story’s central figure, a 20-something Damascus native named Taim. His condition is clearer. He is in a coma, having been beaten bloody for unknown reasons after being stopped at a highway checkpoint in 2015.

On stage level, members of Taim’s circle tend to his body (or rather, to the empty gurney that symbolizes his body) while trying to understand what was going on in his head. Each of them has reasons to feel guilty. His mother, Amal, pushed him away with traditional overparenting and a disdain for his choices. His sister, Nada, withdrew not only from him but also from the rest of the family by moving to Beirut. His girlfriend, Salma, had begun to fear that her “feelings of worry, pity and guilt” would “eventually drown out love.” And his friend Osama, a superannuated hippie, may have involved the younger man too deeply in his project of becoming “a blob of jelly” with the help of ample supplies of hashish.

While these four work out their unfinished business with Taim, his consciousness, in the form of the intense actor Mohammad Alrefai, observes and comments on the action ironically, uncertain whether he may yet be alive. In that regard, he is (as Mr. Al Attar admits in a program note) a thinly veiled metaphor for the “gray-zone” state of his country, and also a metaphor for the dreams of a political theater “whose values failed to become real when it was still possible.” In this, we begin to discern an autobiographical strain in the play. Taim, we learn, had become disaffected by the resistance movement, whose embrace of religiosity and armed combat seemed too similar to the thing it was meant to resist. When he was beaten, he was, like many a 20-something anywhere, trying to make a film about his disaffection.

That film, which we see and hear in pungent excerpts, becomes a point of contention among the survivors. (Who owns the footage and the right to finish it?) But the central conflict of “While I Was Waiting” is the one that plays out between the gray-zone ghosts and the folks still busily living below. The four survivors scrap and smirk and laugh in defiance of any agenda that might want to make them model stage Arabs by defining them as saintly victims. They are manipulative, petty and vindictive whenever they are not equally honest, loving and forgiving. Indeed, were it not for the contrast with the dire fates of Taim and Omar, they might be characters in a telenovela, though they are enacted by an excellent cast with much more subtlety.

That tension, along with some astonishing visual images that arise from it, keeps “While I Was Waiting” on a narrow course between horror and banality. Taim’s film is projected on a semitransparent screen through which Taim himself fades in and out of view. (The set design is by Bissane Al Charif, the lighting design by Abdulhameed Khaleifa.) At another point, Omar blows soap bubbles down upon Salma as she looks wistfully out the window of the apartment she and Taim shared. Wonderfully, the bubbles look the way we sometimes feel — that prickly frisson — when we sense we are accessing the uncanny.

I was not always convinced that such moments of beauty did justice to the horror of the situation, but that may be the point. “While I Was Waiting” seems to ask whether we have a moral obligation to live in danger if we can escape it, or whether our obligation is rather the opposite. Living in the gray zone does not seem to be an answer.

If the play does not definitively provide any better one, the production itself does. Mr. Al Attar left Damascus (“against my will”) in 2012 and now lives in Berlin. The play’s director, Omar Abusaada, is still based in Damascus but spends most of his time in Berlin as well. Everyone in the company has had to make difficult and in some cases dangerous choices about where they will live and what kind of work they will do. (The play could not, of course, be performed in Syria.) Getting everyone to New York for the festival was a maddening farce that was only partly successful, because of the travel restrictions now in place for people carrying Syrian passports. Mr. Khaleifa was denied a visa, so his design was executed here by a “lighting interpreter,” Zakaria Al-Alami.

You have to believe that theater is worth a lot if people are willing to risk so much to make it. But then, if you are Syrian, perhaps you have to value life in the same way: as a terrible risk worth taking. Taim seems to have succumbed to an ideology of hopelessness that Mr. Al Attar and the company of his play have survived. In doing so, they have given new life to the idea of political theater by showing us how it may look a lot like domestic drama, as seen from above.