When Lebanon erupted into civil war during the 1970s, the conflict split the country’s capital city Beirut into two halves. In the uninhabited space between them, foliage began to grow and thrive, creating a lush, verdant demarcation that became known as “the green line.”
In playwright-director Makram Ayache’s play of the same name, which played this fall at Buddies in Bad Times, two queer love stories blossom in two different Beiruts. In the first Beirut, set in 1978, Naseeb (played by Oshen Aoun), ever the protector, becomes consumed with making plans to extricate himself and his sister Mona (Zaynna Khalife) from the war-torn city. Among Mona’s many concerns lies her growing and forbidden attraction to her classmate Yara (Basma Baydoun). Meanwhile, in a second Beirut, set in the present day, Lebanese-Canadian Rami (Oshen Aoun) passes the night at a gay bar and encounters the enchanting FiFi (Waseem Alzer).
Ayache’s direction is warm and inviting and Anahita Dehbonehie’s set design beautifully amplifies these interwoven storylines, which creep toward one another across time, as though two halves of a bifurcated whole. At their meeting point, audiences find not an uninhabited space but, rather, a space densely populated by questions of memory, family history, love and loss.
This article appeared in the 2025 Dec – 2026 Jan issue.
