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 "Love and War on the Rooftops" played to a full house in the
capital Beirut on Tuesday, a rollicking play within a play about
a Sunni Muslim and an Alawite district in the coastal city of
Tripoli.
Some locals have welcomed the project but others have accused
actors from both sides of being traitors, a reflection of the
daily tension between the Sunni Bab al-Tabbaneh district and the
inhabitants of Jabal Mohsen, whose Alawite sect is an offshoot
of Shi'ite Islam.
It worsened four years ago when conflict erupted across the
border in Syria, pitting the government of President Bashar al-Assad,
an Alawite, against an insurgency dominated by Sunni Islamists.
The tension often boils over into violence, and sometimes claims
lives.
At first, Khodor Mukhaiber, 19, refused to act in the play with
Jabal Mohsen residents. He never expected he would end up having
friends in the Alawite part of the city, on the other side of
the aptly-named Syria Street.
"I believed they were our enemies because that's how we were
raised," said Khodor, who plays the part of an exasperated
director.
"After I met them in this play ... I saw that we were alike.
We're all young people - they don't have work, we don't have
work, we have the same crises."
Around 57 percent of Tripoli's residents are classified as
"deprived" in a United Nations poverty report published in
January.
"Before the play we did nothing, there was no work, nothing,
just sitting in the street," said Ali Amoun, 23, whose character
falls in love with a Sunni, sparking a scandal.
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The drama unfolds on Tripoli's rooftops in a whirl of music, card
games, violence and secret romantic rendezvous, revolving around a
play in which the actors are constantly arguing with the director.
Fatima Mukhaiber, 23, who plays Amoun's love Aisha, describes how,
after becoming involved in the play, the new friends met in each
other's districts to break the fast during the Muslim holy month of
Ramadan.
"I used to have this thought - why are we enemies? Now I'm doing
something about it," she said.
The play is a project by March, a Lebanese civil rights advocacy
group, and is described by the play's director Lucien Bourjeily as a
form of "drama therapy".
Back on the streets, communal tensions have been eased by a security
plan implemented last year, but Ali said it been hard for some
friends to accept his participation in the play.
Ali lost his brother in the violence, but has put his anger aside.
"Both sides lost martyrs," he said.
He recently got a tattoo on his left arm of two masks representing
tragedy and comedy - the classical symbol of the theater - to cover
his old scars.
(Additional reporting by Reuters Television; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
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