Wajdi Mouawad's Tous des oiseaux: A Polyglot Tragedy of Love and Identity

Wajdi Mouawad's play Tous des oiseaux premiered in 2017, marking a return to the tragic fury of his earlier work. The play originated from a 2008 airport encounter with historian Natalie Zemon Davis, who suggested Mouawad write about a Muslim character. Instead of adapting her book on al-Hassan al-Wazzan (Leo Africanus), Mouawad created an original piece addressing similar themes. The play follows Eitan, a German geneticist in New York, who falls in love with Wahida, an American doctoral student of Arab descent. Their relationship is violently rejected by Eitan's traditional Jewish family during Passover. After a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, Eitan is hospitalized, and the family gathers to tear itself apart. Mouawad uses multiple languages—German, English, Arabic, Hebrew—performed by an international cast, to explore the confusion of identity and the war of words. The minimalist set, reminiscent of Simon McBurney, features moving walls and a banquet table that becomes a hospital bed. The play draws parallels to Oedipus Rex and Interstellar, suggesting that truth arrives too fast. The title references Leo Africanus's legend of an amphibious bird that becomes a fish, symbolizing transformation and loss. Mouawad asserts that theater's role is to go toward the enemy, against one's tribe, and to refuse transmission through grief, instead metamorphosing identity into utopia.