‘Rituals of Signs and Transformations’ Play at Babel Theater

Tuqus al-Isharat wa-l-Tahawwulat (Rituals of Signs and Transformations) was written by Saadallah Wannous in 1994, after he had been diagnosed with a terminal illness.

According to Wannous’s prologue, the play takes as its point of departure the historian Fakhri al-Barudi’s account of an incident in the 1880s in Damascus in which two clerics were involved in a feud that split the city into two factions. One was the Mufti, the chief religious legal authority, also referred to in the play as Sheik Qassim, and the Naqib-Al Ashraf, also referred to as Sir Abdallah, the leader of the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. When the chief of police arrested the Naqib while he was engaged in lovemaking with his mistress in his semi-private garden, the Mufti concocted a scheme to save the Naqib’s reputation.

This production, the world premiere of the English-language version, produced by AUB and Robert Myers, and directed by Sahar Assaf, is based on a translation by Robert Myers and Nada Saab commissioned by Silk Road Rising Theatre in Chicago and the MacArthur Foundation. The play will receive a staged reading in March 2014 at Silk Road Rising and at the Segal Theatre Center at CUNY Graduate Center in New York, which is also publishing the translation in a collection of Wannous’s plays. As Wannous writes in the prologue, the problems the play raises are “current and ever recurrent.”

This event is free of charge

For Reservations: tuqqus@gmail.com

For more information: 01.744.033 – 70.814.872