Unforgettable cruelties: influence of Antonin Artaud's theater of cruelty on Abla Farhoud's Jeux de Patience and Wajdi Mouawad's Incendies

The goal of the present study is to analyze the influence of Antonin Artaud's theater of cruelty on the present-day dramas of Lebanese-Canadian playwrights Abla Farhoud and Wajdi Mouawad. Their respective use of what Artaud calls the concrete language of the stage as well as their tendency to question the role of articulated language in the expression of trauma allows for new understandings of the theater's role within communities experiencing turmoil, displacement, and loss. By employing Artaudian cruelty on both a formal as well as a thematic level, the plays of Farhoud and Mouawad bear witness to the atrocities of war, while simultaneously offering new hope to victims and survivors of trauma by positioning the stage as a theater of witness