The sun has set on the city of Grenoble. The nearby Alps, their silhouette darker than the night sky, are making their presence felt. Hundreds of theatregoers have huddled at the Hexagone Theatre for a sold-out performance of Forêts (Woodlands), a new play by Quebec playwright and director Wajdi Mouawad.

The opening scene is set in Montreal. It’s party time in the eighties, and new-wave music is blaring. Stage right, the cast is getting ready for some serious fun. One of the characters, a drama student, is horsing around, declaiming from a seventeenth-century tragedy by Jean Racine: “Is the oracle saying everything that he seems to be saying? ” His friends ask him to shut up.

As far as oracles are concerned, Mouawad isn’t the quiet type either. Just thirty-eight years old, he has already written fifteen plays and a novel, and was recently named artistic director of French theatre at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. In Forêts, a four-hour saga encompassing the twentieth century, he blows tirelessly on the embers of our funeral pyres: the Ardennes, Dachau, the engineering school at the Université de Montréal. From their ashes emerges a portentous phoenix, a commentary on hatred and reconciliation, on world wars and gender wars, on betrayal and bequeathal, a story of sex (not always good) and incest (not always bad) in the absence of the gods. Call it an epic play. If Forêts weren’t at times so humorous, it could also be called a tragedy.

Mouawad’s play, the third in a tetralogy, is a departure from the previous two, which deal with civil war in an unnamed but easily recognizable Lebanon. Littoral (Tideline) is the story of a young Montreal man who returns to his dead father’s native land. He wants to bury the old bugger but learns that there is no room for an extra body anywhere in the country, which is a massive cemetery. Incendies (Scorched) is the story of young Montreal twins who return to their dead mother’s native land. They are looking for a father they have never met. In both works, Mouawad makes a case for the stage as surrogate war-crimes tribunal or, more pointedly, as truth and reconciliation commission. Whether he is dealing with the Middle East or family secrets, with mass graves or closet skeletons, Mouawad’s avowed goal remains to repair deep trauma by breaking the silence.

Both plays are semi-autobiographical works in which the protagonists recall an attack on a bus, a harrowing tale by any standard. Unidentified gunmen douse it in gasoline and set it alight, burning alive its passengers. This powerful story, a leitmotif that also surfaces in Mouawad’s novel, Visage retrouvé, is not a figment of his imagination. The attack occurred on April 13, 1975 and is widely seen as marking the beginning of Lebanon’s civil war. Wajdi saw the attackers, Maronite Christian militias, and the victims, who were mostly Palestinian. He was a six-year-old bystander, no longer innocent.

Mouawad was born in a tiny village called Deir el Kamal ( The Monastery of the Moon ) in 1968. At the time, Lebanon, a multicultural Mediterranean country, was called “the Switzerland of the Middle East.” When civil war broke out, his family was caught up in the hostilities. By the time that war ended, in 1990, it is estimated that 100,000 had been killed and 100,000 more had been maimed. Countless others, like Mouawad’s parents, went into exile. They went first to France, in 1978, but his older brother and sister were refused working papers there, and the family moved again, this time to Canada, in 1983. The Arabic-speaking boy, who became a French-speaking adolescent, did not want to leave, but he had little choice.

I catch up with Mouawad in Grenoble, one of the sixteen cities on the European Forêts tour. ( The play is set to open at the Espace Go in Montreal in January and at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in March.) He asks me to meet him at his hotel, the Mercure. When we meet, I joke that the gods may not have deserted us after all. Mouawad smiles politely at the suggestion. It’s 10 a.m., and I ask if he’s had breakfast. I know that the cast was up late last night. The performance, which Mouawad attended, ended at midnight, and everyone was still having dinner at 1 a.m. He informs me that he has been up for hours since he sleeps only three hours a night when he is writing. He seems fit, however, lithe even, perhaps because he is a walker. He has already been on an hour-long stroll this morning. Mouawad has conceived entire plays on his long treks across the Island of Montreal, hearing out the characters, capturing their voices. Walking is working.

“My body has to move for my mind to think clearly,” he explains. “It’s as if I can’t think when I’m not in motion.” We were speaking French. His accent is best described as mid-Atlantic. He sounds meditative, perhaps because he speaks so softly, sometimes hesitantly, like a hiker taking his chances on thin ice. But one should not mistake his gentleness for lack of assertiveness. Mouawad has no qualms about giving opinions about life-and-death issues. That is what oracles do, and that is why his work has often been described as mythological in substance and in tone.

Mouawad’s plays stand out against the backdrop of Québécois theatre, especially the work of Robert Lepage, the dominant force in Quebec theatre since the 1980s. That charmer’s forte has been his ability to generate evocative visuals, enchanting images that have pleased crowds all over the world. By contrast, Mouawad is a writer first, and many of his plays have already been directed by others. His work is also more jarring, more political. Citing Jan Patocka, the Czech philosopher, Mouawad believes in the “solidarity of the shaken.” He says: “That is what the theatre must show.”

I first met Mouawad in Paris in January 2001. He was on his way to Beirut, the city his father had fled, for a performance of Littoral. Sitting in a Montmartre café, he told me that he was apprehensive about returning to Lebanon with a cast of Québécois actors. How would a real Lebanese audience respond to faux Lebanese characters bent on telling them that, hey, war sucks? “Is hating human? ” he wondered. “What is left of our humanity after hatred? ” He paraphrased Antigone, arguing that burying the vanquished — not loathing them — was what separated man from beast. “Our humanity is not a foregone conclusion,” he added. “It must be preserved.” Yet Mouawad, a writer, a Christian, a vigilant observer of the human soul, has hate in his bones nonetheless. “It catches me unawares,” he confessed, “when I look in my father’s eyes and I see the suffering, the sorrow, the sadness. When I try to understand, I end up hating those who did that to him. I don’t know their names, but I can picture their faces. They are the faces of the soldier, the assassin, those who destroy, rob, and rape. That is who I see in my father’s eyes.”