Memento | Lebanon

Playwright: Hala Moughanie

Translator: Neil Blackadder

Director: Patrizia Acerra

Synopsis: A stranger shows up in the main square of a village. He’s expecting to buy the land on behalf of his company, which plans to turn it into a profitable rice field. As he waits for the seller who was supposed to meet him there, he talks with a woman whom he takes to be the caretaker of this land where the vegetation is inexplicably dying. She’s a rebellious woman who speaks in enigmatic language, and makes clear that she feels herself viscerally connected to the earth — a perspective incompatible with the stranger’s project.

Join us from 5:30 to 6:30 for a special pre-performance reception before each reading. Enjoy sweets, along with juice and coffee before we begin our reading. The reading will begin at 6:30 PM followed by a talkback.

Performances are FREE to the public and reservations are not required. DONATIONS help keep the festival free!

Hala Moughanie (Playwright)

Hala Moughanie is a writer living in Beirut, Lebanon, where she also works as a consultant in the field of international cooperation. She has always been interested in the role of memory in a country under reconstruction where the stigmata of the war are still perceptible; she has also been involved in Lebanese politics. Her texts try to dissect our ways of experiencing the world by questioning the notion of identity and the way it is articulated in our relationships to others, to the places we live or imagine, and to history. She approaches language—whose formal uses are an integral part of social and political systems—in a new way, detaching it from formal and conventional usage in order to give back to words their deeper meaning and to allow us to (re)think our political and poetic ties with the world. In 2022, Moughanie was awarded the Actes Sud / La Colline literary prize for her plays Tais-toi et creuse (2007), La mer est ma nation (2015) and Memento (2019). Her first novel Il faut revenir will be published by Éditions Project’îles in September 2023

Neil Blackadder (Translator)

Neil Blackadder translates drama and prose from German and French. He has contributed many translations to IVP, including of plays by Lukas Bärfuss, Mishka Lavigne, and Ewald Palmetshofer that were later produced by theatres in Chicago, London, New York, and elsewhere. Neil has received grants from the NEA, PEN, and the Howard Foundation, and he’s Translations Editor for Another Chicago Magazine. In Spring 2023, Neil was Translator in Residence at Princeton University, where he directed a reading of Memento.