He appealed the decision and was rebuffed. The censors would not provide an explanation. When he started receiving offers of political cover from various factions, he said, he knew that the fight he had on his hands was no longer his own, and that the performance risked being used anyway.
How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fool's Joke was to have been presented on Saturday at Art Lounge, a fashionably disheveled gallery that doubles as a bar and boutique on the outskirts of the city in the drab Karantina industrial district.
Reached by telephone, the owner of the space, Nino Azzi, said he was relieved. "It's better to sort out all the legalities in advance," he said. "It's a bit delicate right now."
A year after fighting between Israeli troops and Hezbollah in Lebanon, the country remains on tenterhooks. The lingering specter of the long civil war is reinforced by a standoff between pro-government and opposition parties, and by continued fighting between the Lebanese army and Islamists in the north.
Mroue and his contemporaries were once considered part of a postwar generation, but they have not entirely escaped Lebanon's cyclical violence. Mroue is more aware of that than most.
"We know we are in the midst of a cold civil war," he said. "There may be no fighting, but we know the fighters are there. Even the younger generation is ready to fight."
Born in Beirut in 1967, Mroue studied theater at the Lebanese University, where he met Saneh, his wife and frequent collaborator.
When they were in their early 20s, the couple created a stage adaptation of The Journey of Little Gandhi, a novel by the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury. Since then they have collaborated formally and informally on an ever more multidisciplinary body of work that includes videos and installations combining photography, text and sculpture.
Yet theater remains the spine of their art. Few of the theater directors who were active in the 1980s are staging plays in Beirut now. Mroue and Saneh have helped sustain Lebanese theater by pushing it into the realm of performance art.
With a string of formally inventive, astringent performance pieces to their credit, they are to Beirut what the Wooster Group is to New York: a blend of avant-garde innovation, conceptual complexity and political urgency, all grounded in earthy humor.
"Rabih is a thinker," said Walid Raad, one of Lebanon's best-known artists. "There are concepts, plays, figures, texts and forms - and Rabih has something to say to, and about, them. At the same time, it always seems as if his dialogue is in the service of the present and future, in Lebanon and elsewhere."
In Mroue's view, a Beirut audience would have implicitly understood the genesis of his latest piece. "It came out of a real fear of another civil war," he said.
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