FREIKEH, Lebanon: "In Tibet, there is a habit of placing a loaf of bread on the roads of rocky mountains so that lost people will find it and keep from starving. The bread is known as torma, and though is often eaten by birds, it sometimes does help a lost soul," says Lebanese theater legend Mounir Abou Debs. "Theater for me is torma. I am satisfied if my message (or torma) reaches only a few people. In fact, I am satisfied if it only reaches the actor or actress themselves."

Abou Debs is referring to his latest Arabic-language play "La Statue et Le Reve" ("The Statue and the Dream") which he both wrote and directed, and which opened Lebanon's Freikeh Festival 2004 last Thursday.

The festival, which runs until Sept. 18, is one of the smallest festivals Lebanon has to offer - featuring poetry, cinema and painting, but mainly theater. It has been running for five years in this little town just 10 minutes into the mountains from the Beirut suburb of Antelias.

"La Statue et Le Reve" was staged in the tiny town's abandoned silk factory dating from the 19th century (owned by Abou Debs), though few of those in the less than 50 strong audience could digest it.

The strangeness of the script sometimes slipped into pure absurdity, the acting into melodrama, though the set was captivating and the very physical performers had presence.

Abou Debs, now 71, is considered by most to be one of the pioneers of Lebanese theater. He studied music with Lebanese writer and composer Assi Rahbani and attended plastic art courses at the Lebanese Academy for Fine Arts (ALBA). In 1950, he traveled to Paris where he studied plastic arts at the National School of Fine Arts, theater at the Roger Gaillard Theater School and classic literature at the Sorbonne.

In 1960, upon his return to Lebanon, he founded the first theater school here - the Modern Theater School - with the support of the Baalbek International Festival committee. Though influenced by the methods of professors in the art, theory and performance of theater like Konstantin Stanislavski and Edward Gordon Craig, Abou Debs is known for creating his own independent style, becoming the first Lebanese director to formulate a theory of the theater.

He has directed several plays, including "Oedipus Rex" for the Festival of Mediterranean Countries in Casablanca in 1961, "Hamlet" at the Baalbek Festival (1964) and "The King is Dying" in 1965 at major festivals in Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad. Today, this colorful old man with long white hair still runs the Modern Theater School (independently from the Baalbek Festival) in Freikeh, though it attracts only a few students annually for its three-year program.

"La Statue et Le Reve" starts when an art student (Fadi Mansour) and his friend (Maya Sebaali), enter a room containing three statues (Rossana Abou Absi, Nathalie Akkari and Tarek Kannich). The boy quietly withdraws to a corner to paint while the girl lies down on a wooden bed and travels to a dream world where the statues talk to her.

The statues speak of their past, reveal their memories, show their emotions and pose questions about the meaning of life. One of them keeps asking, "Why is this door always closed?" while  the other says, "What I am looking for is not in this world."

Through the girl's dream and the statues' hallucinatory and often incomprehensible remarks, Abou Debs wants to push the spectator to think not about the actions and words on stage, but about what lies beyond them. This is his method. He is standing on the thin line between statue and human, life and death, reality and illusion, here and beyond, wakefulness and dream, sight and blindness. One of the statues says, for example, "Behind the stage curtain is the secret key," showing the director's belief in the revelatory powers of theater.

"The secret key is on the platform," Abou Debs explains, "The platform is a space where the actor/actress reaches him/herself."

Abou Debs' script, however, meant to be visionary, original and thought-provoking, becomes too bizarre, lyrical and at times even boring.

One strong asset of the 40-minute play was the set. It was unusual and at the same time appropriate for "poor theater," a kind within which Abou Debs works. Poor theater, as far removed from the grand spectacle as possible, uses only minimal props and effects and relies on the performer's presence. On the stage were four wooden chairs, a box and a bed. The platform was erected inside a 40-meter stone room with one-meter thick walls and around 40 windows.

Ultimately "La Statue et Le Reve," provides a glimpse into the mind of Abou Debs and his obscure though worthy effort to provide Freikeh torma - survival food for the lost soul. He hopes more people will eat that torma, and that his school in the village will one day receive people from all over the Arab world.

The Freikeh Festival 2004 runs until September 18, with independent foreign and local films showing nightly between Sept. 12 and 18, an exhibition of sculpture and painting by local artists, and a night of French poetry on Sept. 10. For more information and tickets call +961 3 425 280.