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A garrulous, sharp-voiced young man barges across the stage and introduces himself to the audience as the waiter of the Al-Lahza Qahwa (Café of the Moment). He loudly declares that the entire café staff, consisting of himself, has been mobilized to serve them. Bugging people in the audience to give him their orders, the waiter returns with a plate laden with cups half-filled with tea and presses them to sip. Thus did Btifrok Ala Thania (It Changes in a Second) open—in a hyper and buoyant atmosphere that foreshadowed the comic humor of the play. The play was written in colloquial Arabic and directed by AUB theater instructor, Sharif Abdunnur, founder and director of the new amateur theater troupe, Masrah al-Arab (Arab Theater). It starred the group’s young actors: Yasmina Hatem, Raouf Farhat Khalifeh, Achraf Mtaweh, Johnny El-Hage, and Cynthia Salameh. Its plot revolved around a highbrow public schoolteacher who goes to the café to kill time, waiting for nobody in particular, and the bucolic, oddly dressed young man who tries to seduce her into having sex with him—but to no avail. The schoolteacher, played by Hatem, tells the street-smart young man (Khalifeh) that she is an Arabic teacher, but hates the language she teaches. Indeed, the Ashrafieh French accent of her Arabic speech attests to her self-admitted dislike of Arabic. It certainly provided an incongruous contrast with her flirter’s very countrified dialect. The script itself is loaded with subtle and not so subtle sexual language, the apex of which was perhaps the scene in which formal Arabic was used to tone down the sexual language, otherwise sounding crude if spoken in the colloquial. The second play, performed directly after the first, was Machhad Min Al-Masrah (A Scene from the Theater). A mime largely based on audience participation, it starred a single performer, the director himself. Abdunnur began by silently taking out objects from his coat and using body language to prime volunteers from the audience about the main topic of the play: the furtive endeavors of a just married couple to get physical. As the untrained ’actors’ got on stage, hilarious ripples of laughter echoed throughout the audience. The awkward quirks of the volunteers, as well as their funny, gendered behavior, generated the laughs and smiles that lit the people’s faces as they exited Monot Theater.
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