Chapter 8 - No Demand No Supply: Documentary Theater Transforming the Mainstream Media

Summary

It is a very confident assertion by practitioners that verbatim theatre displaces mainstream media as the form of documentation most likely to deliver “truth”. According to these practitioners, the central purpose of verbatim work has gone well beyond the staging of “hidden voices.”

–Brown and Wake

Early April 2016, like many Lebanese, I woke up to the news of the special operation that the Lebanese security forces did to bust a human trafficking network and save 75 Syrian women imprisoned in two brothels east of Beirut. The news shocked me to the core; for months, I could not forget the women and the suffering they endured. In 2017 I decided to put the stories of the women survivors on stage. In an ultimate objective to retell the stories of the 75 rescued women, so they do not fall into the Lebanese collective amnesia, I embarked on a research journey that led me to discover that I was essentially telling the stories of many other forgotten women in the world of prostitution.

This chapter reflects on the process and methodology of making the documentary performance No Demand No Supply: A Rereading of Lebanon's 2016 Sex Trafficking Scandal. By reflecting on the content and context of the performance, I argue that documentary theater has the potential to not only displace the mainstream media in telling the “truth” but also to influence the latter in a certain direction and ultimately alter our social consciousness.

The Play in Context

On March 27, 2016, the inquisitorial commission in Mount Lebanon raided Chez Maurice and Silver, two brothels in Jounieh area, east of Beirut, and14 saved 75 Syrian refugee women from what became known later as the largest sex trafficking network in the history of Lebanon. The story gained huge media attention as the women told horrifying stories about the torture and abuse they suffered at the hands of one of the lead figures of the network, which was making more than one million dollars a month according to the police reports. A few weeks after the uncovering of the story, the media lost interest in it, and slowly it started fading into oblivion.