We Live in Cairo is ardent, thoughtful, and sharply self-aware. It’s a moving, quirky, and sneakily timely new musical that may be shaggy and unfocused in parts but in the end that doesn’t really matter. Now premiering at New York Theater Workshop, the show has been in development for ten years, and its music is quite impressive, more polished than its script. Composed in a heartful indie rock idiom inflected with strikingly poignant middle eastern melodies, the score is in some passages extraordinarily beautiful.
Written and composed by Daniel and Patrick Lazour and directed by Taibi Magar, We Live in Cairo follows 6 young people swept up in the 2011 revolution that ended the 30-year dictatorship of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. These characters are all well-defined, vivid and appealing, with each given a compelling coming-of-age story. Against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, the show traces their very different journeys from revolutionary fervor to more complicated and adulterated emotions including outright disillusionment and heartbreak.
Fadwa (Rotana Tarabzouni) is the group’s firebrand, her mind constantly on activism as she’s bent on proving herself worthy of her late anti-Mubarak father. Tarabzouni is terrific in this role—a compressed spring of determination and zeal. When the play opens she’s returning from jail, having been arrested for anti-Mubarak messages on Facebook. She meets the others at a secret gathering place where they plan subversive political actions. Amir (Ali Louis Bourzgui) is there, a singer-guitarist who writes songs with his brother Hany (Michael Khalid Karadsheh), and so is Karim (John El-Jor), a satirical graffiti artist.
To this core Amir introduces his girlfriend Layla (Nadina Hassan), a photographer who insists she’s “not political.” And Karim brings in Hassan (Drew Elhamalawy), another graffiti artist clearly attracted to him. Karim knows he’s gay but Hassan is conflicted. The others at first mistrust Hassan because his family belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The show’s opening scene had me worried, as it consists of a dopey and childish satirical lampoon with an actor prancing in a giant plaster Mubarak mask. Happily, no such simplistic agit-prop occurs again.
Fadwa and Amir say the group is strictly secular liberal; they seek a free, democratic, Western-oriented future for Egypt, but events soon put pressure on that consensus. Layla, no longer worried about her university place, it seems, turns suddenly very political after seeing photos of a man beaten to death in police custody. Then she cools to Amir (or not?), saying that since he’s a Coptic Christian and she’s a Muslim they can’t marry anyway, so they best go no further in their relationship. Amir, for his part, becomes famous when a protest anthem he plays at a mass rally goes viral. He clearly has options after that, and loves her unshakably. Her uncertainties and shifting allegiances prove to be the shakiest threads in the plot.
The biggest and most interesting complications arise after mass protests topple Mubarak. The elections that follow bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power, led by Mohamed Morsi, and Fadwa wants to keep protesting to bring Morsi down. Hany, however, an aspiring lawyer, says they should respect the results of the democracy they fought for, and leaves for New York to attend Columbia Law School. Hassan wavers as his fundamentalist father browbeats him. And when Morsi is then overthrown in a coup by General Sisi, Hassan attends a pro-Brotherhood rally with Amir, placing them both in grave danger when the event is attacked by Sisi’s thugs.
The acting is splendid in the show but the main achievement is the music. It’s no small matter that every cast member has an exceptional singing voice. The Lazours’s songs are dense with rich character information, in the melodies and lyrics, and unusually quick and precise pitch control is needed to handle their complicated tonal shifts. The performers’ mastery of this is enough reason to see the show.
That said, the political dimension also has serious punch at the moment. This is a play about the aftereffects of a democratic election won by enemies of democracy. It’s also a play about activists young enough not to know yet that the world they have fought for is bound to be more complicated than their ideals. All this touches very raw nerves on the weekend before the most terrifying American election of our lifetimes. The play’s zealous sextet is a sobering reminder that we may soon need mass resistance to authoritarianism close to home, and that such pressure almost always begins with the breathtakingly naïve and heedless courage of the young.
Photo: Joan Marcus
Book, Music & Lyrics by The Lazours
Directed by Taibi Magar
New York Theater Workshop
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