About the work
“Die Wurzel aus Sein” (original title “Racine carrée du verbe être”, literally “Square Root of the Verb To Be”) is a full-length play by the Lebanese Canadian writer and director Wajdi Mouawad. He staged it himself in 2022 at the Théâtre national de la Colline in Paris, which he has run since 2016, and also performed in it. The text was published by Actes Sud in 2023. The German translation is by Uli Menke; the first German-language production, directed by Stefan Bachmann, opened at the Vienna Burgtheater on 10 April 2025.
Plot
The starting point is the flight of Mouawad's family from Lebanon during the civil war in 1978. The play imagines how the life of a character named Talyani Waqar Malik would have turned out had the family taken other paths, and presents him in five versions: a neurosurgeon in Rome, a taxi driver in Paris, a painter in Quebec, a death row prisoner in Texas and the owner of a jeans shop in Beirut. All five lives are told in the week after the explosion in the port of Beirut on 4 August 2020.
Cultural significance
The play links Mouawad's recurring themes of exile, origin and family with a thought experiment about lost possibilities. The Vienna production, with Thiemo Strutzenberger playing all five versions of Talyani, was described by critics as gripping but overdrawn in places.