Iraq play is a tragicomedy

Two little men argue on a creaky stage, locked like electrons in orbit, while an actress wearing a powdered face and red lipstick lurks in the wings near a harried director who repeats "God willing" into a cellphone as the audience for the evening's performance gathers in the lobby, whiffs of perfume competing with the faint scent of gunpowder.

War in the streets, war in the wings; this is theater in Baghdad.

Suicide bombers explode, armored vehicles creep down alleys, soldiers squint through barbed wire. But in the half-lighted theater, amid worn velour seats and costume racks sparse in sequins and silk, director Haider Munathar runs through lines of a satirical comedy about nattering politicians and a lost king in a strange, violent yet hopeful country known as Iraq.

"Bring the King, Bring Him" opened a few days ago, hours after a car bomb shook the National Theater, crumpling the dressing room ceiling and bruising Zahra Beden, Munathar's wife, and another actress in the play. Munathar, who also stars as the king, worried that the attack would keep audiences away. But the crowds keep coming, braving the city's frequent explosions and horizon of curling smoke.

"We are working in an impossible situation," says Munathar, a slight man with a graying beard who moves with the mercurial trickery of a cartoon character. "But we just can't fold. We have to work. The curtain must keep going up.

"We were sold out the other night. The Iraqi people have pushed past their state of fear. Life is coming back."

Munathar says the play is the first at the National Theater since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 to be performed after sunset -- a time of day in the not so distant past when it was too dangerous to wander beyond one's neighborhood.

The play skewers the nation he loves. The two-act cabaret-style show, written by playwright Ali Hussein, portrays Iraqi politicians as petty, corrupt and detached from the people they govern. A scene in parliament shows legislators discussing the ozone layer, importing garlic seeds (there is no garlic in the play's Iraq) and increasing their salaries -- everything but how to end bloodshed and rebuild a broken state. So out of touch is one politician that he proposes (just like a real-life legislator) erecting a huge Ferris wheel "so people can cool off in the summer heat."

Munathar laughs. He loves that line.