BEIRUT — The censors didn't quite know what to do with Lina Khoury's play about sex, rape, menopause and a visit to the gynecologist, but Islamic hard-liners were pretty specific: One wanted to stone the 32-year-old writer; others accused her of being an Israeli agent planting immoral ideas in the Arab world.
The characters in "Women's Talk" share secrets only uttered when men aren't around. Riffs on pubic hairstyles and sexual desires may be a predictable story line in Hollywood, but here Western-influenced portrayals of women in the arts are condemned by clerics and conservatives as devil-inspired liberalism.
Khoury and her sharp-tongued alter egos are part of a coterie of real-life and fictional women across the Middle East who are pushing boundaries as political talk-show hosts, hip-hop divas, war correspondents, a defiantly divorced columnist and characters such as Vola, the red-haired eccentric of the Lebanese film "The Bus" who slips into an affair without any care of what society thinks.
They are at once liberated and repressed, devout and rebellious. Borrowing from Oprah Winfrey, Beyonce and even Hillary Rodham Clinton, they move between tribal and Islamic customs and media markets that are often layered in sexual innuendo.
In Saudi Arabia, women cannot drive or vote, glimpsing equality only during vacations away from the kingdom. But many women in Islamic countries long ago broke through the image of the black-veiled wife peeking from behind courtyard walls. Venture beyond the scrim of conservatism to the film studios of Lebanon, where the diva pose, seductively articulated by Haifa Wehbe, a Shiite Muslim model-actress-singer, is calculated down to the curl of an eyelash.
The crosscurrent of cultures is apparent in Khoury's "Women's Talk," a Middle East version of the Broadway play "The Vagina Monologues" that has turned the diarist into an unwitting Dr. Ruth for women who wear low-cut blouses and slit skirts and also for those draped in niqabs, or face veils, and abayas.
"In the Arab world, I've suddenly become an expert on women and sexuality. It's insane, hilarious. I write plays. I'm not a therapist," said Khoury, whose play closed in February after a two-year run. "Some men are saying that I'm breaking the rules of society and religion. . . . Sexuality and women's freedoms are threatening to men. Some actresses I wanted for the parts wouldn't take them. They were scared of what their husbands or boyfriends would say."
