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Beirut: After nearly three decades of self-imposed exile, Iraq's well-known playwright and director Jawad Al Assadi returned to Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussain, believing the new Iraq was going to be better. Al Assadi discovered he was wrong.
Shocked by the violence and fear among his people, Al Assadi decided last year to settle in Beirut and open his own theatre.
But violence has followed him. Lebanon has been gripped by its worst political crisis since the civil war from 1975 to 1990, and about a dozen politicians, journalists and soldiers have been slain since 2005.
Returning to his homeland right now, he said, would be like "offering yourself as a cheap and ignorant martyr". Instead, Al Assadi is trying to showcase Iraqi culture in his Babel Theatre, located in the trendy Hamra Street in downtown Beirut where artists and intellectuals gather.
Tyrannical widow
The first play produced at Babel Theatre is Al Assadi's Women Sexophone, which is adapted from The House of Bernarda Alba by Spanish dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca.
The play depicts a tyrannical, recently widowed mother who represses her daughters.
Several of Al Assadi's plays have been influenced by the war in Iraq as well as the dictatorship of Saddam's Ba'ath Party that ended with the US-led invasion of 2003.
Women in War, which tells the story of three Iraqi women living in exile in Germany, was presented in Baghdad in May 2004. After a few days and scant audiences, Al Assadi said he realised Iraqis were too scared to go out at night.
"The cultural life was in chaos. I found there was no way to work on a revival of Iraqi theatre because, unlike a painter or sculptor who can work at home, for me, as a dramatist, I live with the society," Al Assadi said in an interview in his elegant office at the Babel Theatre.
"People should come to see my work and if people don't leave their homes after four in the afternoon, then how am I going to work?" he asked.
Al Assadi traces his love of drama to his roots in Karbala, where he was born on July 1, 1952.
"I sat a fine arts exam [at Baghdad University] and was accepted. This move changed my life," he said.
After graduation, he went to Bulgaria in 1976 and earned a PhD from the National Drama Centre in Sofia.
Fearing oppression by Saddam's Ba'ath regime, Al Assadi did not return to Iraq until 2004. His brother, Abdullah, was executed by a government firing squad in 1981.
A second brother, Hussain, was shot dead at a checkpoint west of Baghdad in 2007 as he was driving a bus from Baghdad to Jordan.
"The deaths of my brothers were major shocks in my life. Sometimes these emotions come up in my work. Other times I isolate myself," he said.
Before Hussain's death, Al Assadi produced one of his most renowned plays about the situation in Iraq, Baghdadi Bath.
It is set in a Turkish bath in Baghdad, where two bus drivers come to relax and talk about life in Iraq before and after the US invasion.
Baghdadi Bath was translated into English and some readings have been presented in the United States, according to Robert Myers, a professor of English at the American University of Beirut who helped translate the play.
"The play became a way to talk about the war and US involvement," he added.
Since opening Babel Theatre in Beirut, Al Assadi has hosted Iraqi musician Naseer Shamma, known as a master of the oud, a pear-shaped string instrument, and painter Jabr Alwan. He plans to bring more Iraqi artists.
But Al Assadi worries about the political situation in Lebanon, and his future. "If you ask me whether the strong political situation Beirut is passing through affected my opening of this theatre, I will say yes. It had a very bad and negative effect," Al Assadi said. He has already spent a lot of his own money on the theatre.
Lebanese actors hope he will stay.
"Beirut is still, to this day ... the capital of culture in the Arab world," said Lebanese actor Rifaat Tarabay, who plays in Women Sexophone.
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