Onstage in Beirut, an Intimate Encounter

Inspired by 'Vagina Monologues,' Playwright Takes On Sexual Taboos in the Arab World

BEIRUT Public talk of sex is nothing new in the Lebanese capital. It's in the insults that ritually refer to women's body parts. It's in the sprawling posters of sultry pop stars peppering the concrete-laden cityscape.

Taking it to the theater, though, is another issue -- one that Lina Khoury faced as she tried to get her play "Hakeh Niswan" ("Women's Talk") onstage. In doing so, she broke taboos not only in Lebanon but also in the larger Arab world.

"In 2001, I watched 'The Vagina Monologues' in Chicago. I loved it. It made me feel so good," the 30-year-old Lebanese playwright says from her office.

After landing in Beirut from Arkansas (where she'd earned a master's degree in directing) three years ago, she thought "it could be interesting if I did 'The Vagina Monologues' in Arabic. So I started writing. But when I read parts of it to my friends, they laughed at me, saying it wouldn't pass the censors in a hundred years."

A local performance of "The Vagina Monologues" has never been staged in an Arab country, but "Hakeh Niswan" was inspired by the form and some of the content of the Eve Ensler work. "Hakeh Niswan," however, took on a life of its own when Khoury decided to tackle issues she believes speak more to a Lebanese audience.

"All the subject matters in 'The Vagina Monologues' are important," she says. "But as Lebanese women, or Lebanese audiences, you have to be comfortable with lots of other things before. We have to have dealt with some issues before -- not necessarily solve them, but at least acknowledge them."

Since it premiered in New York a decade ago, the Obie-winning "Vagina Monologues" has become an international phenomenon, adapted and performed in dozens of countries and translated into more than 35 languages. Two years after the premiere, Ensler's interviews with hundreds of women prompted her to found V-Day, a global grass-roots movement that seeks the end of violence against women.

Last year, the V-Day movement involved the Middle East by launching the Karama ("dignity" in Arabic) Program, which provides financial and technical support to regional and national groups seeking to stop violence against women and girls and which raises funds through performances of Ensler's plays.

In light of Khoury's 18-month battle against censorship in Lebanon, however, any play that has sexual language significantly more explicit than that in "Hakeh" could be difficult to bring to the public.

In Khoury's play, for instance, she wasn't allowed to use the Arabic word for vagina, instead having to use a politically correct euphemism. "At first I called it [a typical Shiite name]. Then a friend told me, 'You'll get all the Shiites to rise up against you,' " she recalls, laughing. "Then I thought I found the perfect name. Jamil ["beautiful" in Arabic], because I'm talking about something beautiful, and it doesn't have a sectarian connotation. But just one day before presenting the version to the censors, I realized that Jamil was also the name of Jamil el Sayyed." (Sayyed is the former head of the Surete Generale, a group to which the censorship institution is affiliated.) She ended up deciding to call a vagina "coco."

After five drafts and as many trips to the censors, Khoury finally got approval -- but after months of seeing paragraphs scrapped because of subject matter and language.

Although sexuality is inherently part of the public space in Beirut, large sectors of the society are conservative and traditional. Homosexuality is prohibited by law. "Honor crime" -- such as a man's killing a female relative because of her premarital sex or adultery -- is considered a minor crime by law. Mere dating before a family-approved engagement is frowned upon.

"Hakeh Niswan" addresses such issues as harassment on the street or in public buses, the lack of individual privacy and premenstrual syndrome. "Why is it shameful to talk about PMS, or about having your period? For the life of me, I can't explain that," Khoury says.

"It's not 'The Vagina Monologues,' it's 'Hakeh Niswan.' It's about us, about our problems in life. Some of them are sexual, yes, but it's not the vagina that is talking -- it's the woman who is talking."

In a region where women are often portrayed as submissive, passive and victimized -- and where such issues as violence and rape usually go undiscussed -- it is unusual to see four attractive women (the characters of "Hakeh Niswan") speak unabashedly about women's issues, and all the more unusual for them to do so in an open, witty fashion.

In the monologue about harassment, one of the characters complains: "Men here look at everything that's female, no matter what she looks like or what she's wearing. They all want to stop for a woman waiting for the bus or the taxi to see if maybe she'll ride with them. Sometimes I feel like I'm all just breasts and a . . . " -- triggering roars of laughter as she points to her vagina.

A telling example of the heavy silence surrounding more serious problems such as incest, rape and violence is when a U.N. report last month found that one in four women in Syria had been beaten; regional media made more of the fact that the report was breaking the silence on the issue than of the staggering figure published.

"The problem is that in the world and the society we live, they always blame the woman and treat a divorced woman like a used tissue they ditch in the bin," says another character, explaining why she won't leave her abusive husband.

"We need more stuff like this. It felt good to see these four women talk without shame, without hypocrisy, calling a cat by its name," says Maha Rabbath, a 32-year-old psychologist, after a performance of "Hakeh Niswan" that drew a standing ovation. "But [Khoury] may be targeting an audience that is ready to hear such things. It could be interesting to perform such a play before audiences that are not in closed circles as the Beiruti one is. It's too bad there isn't a tour in different towns and especially debates after -- if you want to change anything, you have to have debates."

"Hakeh Niswan" was scheduled to run for five nights. There was no advertisement or marketing -- just word of mouth. It played to sold-out audiences through those five nights. Then another five nights. It is still playing, and Khoury is hoping the run will last all summer.

"Hakeh Niswan" also seems to have become the talk of the town. Khoury recently was invited to a Beiruti TV show to discuss her play. Another guest on the show, art critic Mohamed Hijazi, attacked Khoury upfront: "I'm glad I don't have daughters so that they don't turn out like you. You and women like you should return to the age of stone."

On the pan-Arab news site Alarabiya.net, an article about the play drew hundreds of comments from readers, including several who slammed the play "as a tool from the West used to deprave Arab society." A few days later, however, the same site posted another article addressing women's sexuality, in which a marriage counselor in Dubai says that the Arab people "are going through a sexual crisis because they don't dare talk about their problems." A few hours later, the site indicated that the article was its most e-mailed, printed and saved story that day.

Looking out at a busy street, Khoury reflects on the controversy she has ignited, saying that discussion, not provocation, was her intention.

"I decided I wanted to talk about problems that I thought were common, and that I was interested in. I wasn't looking for breaking any taboos," she says. "All I wanted is to say these are problems that we have -- let's acknowledge them."