Jacques Maroun’s Al Wa7esh Opens at Théâtre Le Monnot Before a Packed Cultural and Media Audience

Beirut, May 23, 2026 — Before a packed audience of artists, media figures, cultural personalities, and representatives of television, radio, print, and digital press, Al Wa7esh opened at Théâtre Le Monnot with a special preview performance led by the magnetic presence of Carole Abboud and Dory Al Samarany.

Directed by Jacques Maroun, the production brings to Beirut John Patrick Shanley’s celebrated Danny and the Deep Blue Sea in an Lebanese-Arabic translation by Arze Khodr. At the center of this Lebanese staging lies the volatile encounter between its two performers: an emotionally exposed duet carried by tension, rupture, tenderness, and the fragile possibility of connection.

The play follows Roberta and Danny, two wounded outsiders who meet one night in a nearly empty bar. Both arrive armed with fear, anger, and years of buried pain. What begins as confrontation slowly shifts into confession, as two people seemingly incapable of tenderness begin, cautiously and awkwardly, to recognize themselves in one another.

Abboud gives Roberta a presence that is at once bruised and defiant, moving seamlessly between vulnerability and control, exhaustion and instinct. Opposite her, Al Samarany brings Danny a raw, restless energy, shaping him less as a brute than as a man desperately shielding himself from collapse. Together, they create a stage relationship built on silences, eruptions, hesitation, humor, and need.

Rather than treating Danny and the Deep Blue Sea as a distant American text, Al Wa7esh draws Shanley’s world into a distinctly Lebanese emotional landscape. Under Maroun’s direction, the play becomes less about geography than recognition: the familiar sight of people living at the margins of themselves, struggling to name their wounds while reaching, however clumsily, toward grace.

The return of Al Wa7esh to the stage also carries particular resonance. The production was first presented in 2019 at Maroun’s artistic workshop before Lebanon’s successive crises interrupted its path toward a wider audience. Its opening at Théâtre Le Monnot now marks not simply a revival, but the continuation of a theatrical journey long left suspended.

Shanley, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Moonstruck and Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright of Doubt: A Parable, remains one of the defining voices of contemporary American theatre and cinema. Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is a compact, unforgiving work that leaves little room for ornament or evasion, placing extraordinary demands on its performers.

Since its first presentation, Al Wa7esh has drawn attention for the intensity of its lead performances and for its ability to transform an international text into something immediate and locally resonant. In its new run at Théâtre Le Monnot, that force is carried above all by Abboud and Al Samarany, whose performances place audiences face-to-face with fear, rage, humor, longing, and the uneasy hope of redemption.

Written by John Patrick Shanley, translated by Arze Khodr, produced and directed by Jacques Maroun, and starring Carole Abboud and Dory Al Samarany, Al Wa7esh is now playing at Théâtre Le Monnot.