Prisoners Play Jurors in a Land of the Guilty

"In a darkened concrete room the size of a large Manhattan loft, some 200 people sit jammed together on bleachers looking at a long table and 12 empty chairs under a spotlight. They've just heard a small band in the room's corner belt out a lament in Arabic with the chorus "oh my country, my country." There's no heating in the cold, bare space, but the powerfully built lute player with waist-long hair wears only a cotton undershirt over bristling muscles and tattoos. He sports delicately plucked eyebrows. A smallish man in suit and tie appears under the spotlight inches from the audience. He addresses the bleachers: "I hugged my mother for the first time in 18 years today. We're not allowed physical contact during normal visits. Until I joined this project, I had no friends, no hope. Since age 17, I'm serving a life sentence for murder . . . " As he talks, the chairs begin to fill with men of all ages in suits and ties, two Egyptians, an Algerian, a Nigerian who speaks only English, but most are Lebanese.

At Roumieh, Lebanon's biggest penitentiary, in the mountains above Beirut, something unprecedented in the history of the country is happening. Every Sunday for four months, inmates from the all-male prison are performing a play (interspersed with their own music and personal testimonials). What's more, they're doing it in front of an audience from outside, many of them women. The play's director is a woman from outside, a noninmate. They are performing an Arabic version of Reginald Rose's "12 Angry Men," originally an American TV drama and then a famous 1957 movie, in which the characters are sequestered jurors who argue bitterly over a murder case and, after much kicking and screaming, find the defendant not guilty.

According to the director, Zayna Daccache, an energetic 30-something actress famous in Lebanon for starring in a weekly political satire show on television, "prison inmates don't have rights the way they do in the West -- in the Middle East, this kind of thing doesn't happen. But as you know, Lebanon is a crazy, contradictory place. On the one hand, it's the most open and enlightened of the Arab countries; on the other hand, it's one of the most divided and troubled."

Ms. Daccache had come up with the idea because she had worked, some years before, with an Italian director putting on Brecht plays in Italian prisons. It took Lebanese authorities eight months just to agree in principle. She had applied in tandem with her friend Ghassan Moukheiber, member of Parliament for Jounieh and founder of a nongovernmental group that works for judicial reform. His political clout won over the authorities. Then it took Ms. Daccache a year of work in the prison to put on the play."