Square Root of the Verb To Be - Wajdi Mouawad;Linda Gaboriau

Haven’t we all wondered what our lives would have been like had we taken another direction? What if…? To escape the civil war devastating Lebanon in 1978, Talyani Waqar Malik’s family takes the first available flight to Paris. What might have been their destinies had they fled to Rome, Houston, or Montreal, or had they stayed in Paris or Beirut?

Forty-two years after their exile, Talyani describes their lives in the week following the August 2020 explosion in the Port of Beirut from the point of view of an Italian neurosurgeon, a Parisian taxi driver, a Québécois painter, a Texan on death row, and the Lebanese owner of a blue jeans boutique, all iterations of the same man pursued by the same ghosts.

This uchronic story brings together the iconic characters from Wajdi Mouawad’s Cycle domestique—father, mother, brother, and sister and the imagined descendants of Talyani, the playwright’s alter ego—as well as the major themes of his dramatic universe: war and exile, rape and incest, imponderable relationships and identities, crime and redemption. An epic forty years in the making that delves into ecology, cancel culture, medically assisted dying, and the perennial question of love.