Abstract :
The directing profession worldwide is a relatively new trend. Its current conceptualization is roughly a hundred years old. It started at the end of the nineteenth century with the advent of modern naturalism and then became a form of art at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially after the explosion of different directing practices and methods, namely methods advocated by Antonin Artaud, Constantine Stanislavski, and Bretolt Brecht, among others. Rehearsals, or the practice sessions in preparation for the performance, obtained a fundamental role in theater-making and the director was placed at the top of the theater hierarchy. In Lebanon, the director in the “modern” sense of the term - whereby “he” is the creator of the theater performance and where all members of the production crew work under “his” supervision — emerged in the 1950s. It was in the mid 1960s that some Lebanese women, namely Latifa Multaqa and Nidal Ashqar, started to get themselves involved in the directing aspect of the theater (Said, 1998). However, the number of Lebanese women who practice theater directing is limited. According to my field research for this study and the literature review on Lebanese theater, those who have been involved in theater directing between the 1960s and today number approximately fifty directors; only nine of them are women. This limited number of women in the profession raises the question as to whether gender makes a difference as far as the actualities of directing are concerned
