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July 20, 2017

Political theater, with its tendency toward hectoring and grandiosity, is hard to credit these days. After all, both politics and theater have been with us for centuries, barely making an inch of difference in the tide of human brutality. “While I Was Waiting,” a subtly harrowing play by Mohammad Al Attar that opened on Wednesday in a Lincoln Center Festival production, gets around the problem by embracing failure as its central subject: the failure of government, yes, but also of resistance. As a character named Omar says, “How can nothing have changed, after all that happened?” Omar is referring specifically to the aftermath of the attempted peaceful revolution in Syria during the Arab Spring of 2011. Nearly half a million have so far died in the ensuing civil war, yet President Bashar al-Assad remains in power. That sense of stasis despite enormous disruption is what gives Mr. Al Attar’s play its convincing bite: “While I Was Waiting,” as its title suggests, is about the oxymoron of permanent crisis, in which ordinary characters face ordinary problems in a world gone mortally absurd.

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