JULY 23, 2017
When one’s entire life is spent waiting, how does one measure the time? In the play “While I Was Waiting,” which on Saturday wrapped up a run as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, Omar (Mustafa Kur), a former telecom worker from the less affluent and besieged Damascus suburbs, gives us the sum of his life in days—10,749 to be precise. We quickly learn, however, that these only account for twenty-nine of his thirty-one years, as he has spent the past two years no longer alive but not quite dead, suspended in a state of unconsciousness after the pummelling he received in Syrian prisons. [full story]