Iraqi stage can be a perilous place, even when peace is the point of it

Baghdad — THERE is no shortage of stories to tell about the human ache in these badlands. Nurtured by a generation of dictatorship and war, Iraq and its ancient capital, Baghdad, are a modern crucible for themes that have inspired storytellers through the ages.

Tales of tragedy, betrayal and courage. Of the small differences that divide us. And of how to preserve love in the midst of madness.

Kahil Khalid, a 22-year-old Baghdadi playwright, actor and director, says coming up with powerful material under such conditions is easy. He’s written and staged nine plays since he was 16. His latest, “Intensive Care Unit,” to be performed next Sunday at Iraq’s National Theatre, riffs off the metaphor of a comatose country surviving on life support.

The hardest part of theater in Iraq, he says, is putting on a show in a country so dangerous that everyone cowers from the spotlight.

“It’s true that during Saddam’s time we were safer, but it was Saddam who planted this virus of fear in the Iraqi people,” says Khalid, a soft-spoken man with hard convictions, watching his actors rehearse one steamy afternoon. “Now we have killings and crime and people are thinking with their emotions, not reason. I don’t think the Iraqi people will be able to get rid of this virus for 50 years.”

But Khalid refuses to succumb to the paralysis -- despite what most people would see as just cause. Last year, he and good friend and fellow actor Ali Abud Jasim traveled to Durham, N.C., where the U.S. State Department funded performances of Khalid’s play “The Events of September 11.”

Stay in America, the two men were urged when the play’s run ended. Become a refugee.

“I said, ‘No, I’m going back to build my country,’ ” Khalid says.

A week after returning, Jasim was shot dead while working in his brother’s store. He was 26, married just a year and the father of a young child.

“I guess they assumed he was a spy for the Americans,” Khalid says.

Yet even after his friend’s murder Khalid never considered quitting theater. “On the contrary, it made me more determined than ever,” he says. “I accept I could be killed at any moment.”

He makes no attempt to keep below the gunmen’s radar. Khalid’s personal style cannot fail to attract attention. In a country where men uniformly wear sandals and plaid, he dresses in a skin-tight black shirt and bell bottoms over pointy white boots. His long, curly hair spills out from under a white ball cap.

His writing equally defies the constraints of convention.

“Even in Saddam’s time I was known for being daring,” Khalid says. Under Hussein’s vicious Baath Party dictatorship, Baghdad theater steered clear of social and political themes for obvious reasons, leaning instead toward the safety of light comedy.

Khalid chafed against what he calls “strangled and choked theater.” During his years studying theater at a fine arts institute, he devised ways to get around the Baathist committee that pre-screened plays, looking for signs of subversion.

“The Baathists used to write all these reports saying I was misbehaving and presenting plays that insulted the government,” he recalls. His teachers saved him from being expelled. “The teachers would say: ‘He’s young; he did not mean it,’ ” he says. “And they’d promise it would never happen again.”

Had the rebuilding of Iraq after the overthrow of Hussein gone according to plan, the Iraqi arts scene would likely be flowering under newfound freedom. Instead, the occupation’s lawlessness has bequeathed more violence: first an anti-American insurgency, now with an added layer of shadowy internecine warfare marked by assassinations, kidnappings and car bombs.

Violence smothers life in the capital. The city’s rhythms are now dictated by the tactics of staying alive. Parks are empty. Restaurants close early. Most people are home by dinner and stay in for the night. And they’re certainly not going to the theater.

It’s hardly a promising atmosphere to be trying to carve out a career on the stage. For one thing, there’s no box office -- the rare play that gets performed is put on for free -- and therefore no salaries for actors. And audiences, leery of big public gatherings, have mostly evaporated.

It is also getting harder to find women to act in an atmosphere of rising Islamic clericalism. Khalid laments the loss of an actress who was hounded out of a university theater this year after fundamentalists threatened her for wearing a sleeveless blouse. And when the sole actress in “Intensive Care Unit” developed a kidney infection and had to pull out, Khalid was forced to replace her with a male actor.

But not just secular women are threatened. The anonymous, marauding killers are seeking out those whose professions are an incarnation of civil society: teachers, doctors, engineers -- and artists.

Yet Khalid believes there is a latent thirst for art that speaks to that attempt to snuff out the light. In particular, he senses a desire to understand how the onetime trust between Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic groups unraveled so quickly in the power vacuum that followed the overthrow of Hussein in 2003.

“Nobody liked Saddam, but when he was in power we never said we were Shias or Sunnis,” says Khalid, the son of a Shiite father and Sunni mother. “We lived together.”

Raised in the hardscrabble Shiite ghetto of eastern Baghdad now known as Sadr City, Khalid tried soccer before the theater bug bit after his first acting experience at 15. “I always wanted to be famous and loved by people,” he says with a smile.

Now he’s getting a taste, with newspapers and satellite TV stations -- huge in Iraq -- talking about the success of “Intensive Care Unit,” which was performed before 500 people at Baghdad University last month.

Khalid’s company of about a dozen actors is a religiously mixed group. “Some of us pray to God. Some have their problems with God,” he says with a smile. They all mock those demanding that Iraqis identify themselves as Shiite, Sunni or Kurd.

“Intensive Care Unit” also does some sneering, including a dig at “Hamlet.” The play asks, “What’s the point of ‘To be or not to be’ in a place where a child sees his mother and father murdered before his eyes?”

The play takes place on a bare-bones stage: no set, no music. “I want the audience to focus on the words,” he argues -- though, of course, there is no money for sets.

He wants to spread a bit, to write about subjects other than the war and Iraq’s struggles. But for now the struggle is right outside the doors of the National Theatre. Always knocking.

“My drama presents a solution to what the country is going through,” he says. “The solution is love. There is no need to see the differences between us. That’s my message to the audience. The issue is whether they will absorb this idea and practice it in real life.”

He acknowledges that fear is also a potent emotion, “more powerful than love sometimes.” But he also believes in hope.

“We are victims of the coming democracy,” he says. “This is the price of freedom. It’s my job to clear people’s minds, to show them the right path.”

So he has a scene in “Intensive Care Unit” in which Baghdad burns, with Iraq’s political leaders, represented by papers, reduced to ash.

“Iraqis benefit from the burning,” he says, still speaking softly. “These people who are causing the violence now, they won’t last forever.”

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Times staff writer Zainab Hussain in Baghdad contributed to this report.