"The Libyad," Novel Adapted by StagePeaks for the Theatre

Flagstaff, AZ, March 15, 2012 --(PR.com)-- The play opens in a jail cell, somewhere dark and remote, unidentified, sinister. Then we hear a man thinking aloud but we can't see him.

- - Man --
Buried alive ... and ... alone underground
I've come to love the Blackness unsounded.
This jail is nothing. Seven years. Nothing.

2 U.S. Marine Guards are then revealed guarding the steel door to the jail cell, in crisp khaki uniforms and with rifles, at attention. They rudely, profanely, tell the man to shut up, calling him an "Ali Baba."

A Woman's Voice also comes out of the darkness, unseen, and we will learn she is the Angel Jibra'il (Gabriel), come to free him from his prison. She scares the guards but they can't find her, and can't really see the man anywhere either, in the gloomy dungeon.

Cut to the next scene, entirely different, in bright daylight. Jibra'il enters, and she is a beautiful Arab Woman in a very fashionable Italian mini-dress, young, strong, confident.

- - Jibra'il - -
Jibra'il the Archangel flew west to Tripoli, Libya, from heaven today, knowing she had to fly on the wings of the prayers of the Prince, first, to his home: home, whereunto all men direct their prayers and best hopes, where Goddess first created them - before the villain, Father Nature, of the Black's blackest Voice tried to kill Earth. Behold, the last days of his darkest minion, Brother Colonel Muammar al-Qathafi.

Lights up to one side on a suggestion of a Bedouin Tent, and inside it Qathafi at work at a desk, in rich flowing desert robes. He's an old and ugly man who was once handsome and strong, but weakening now.

Several big strong Libyan Guards in uniforms, armed, stand at attention before his desk.

Jibra'il eventually enters, overthrowing the guards and their Captain Samina, a strong confident female soldier too. She confronts Qathafi, and demands he free the Prince from his dungeon, but Qathafi doesn't know where or who the Prince is, nor if Jibra'il is an angel or not, as of course Jibra'il is usually depicted as a male. She orders him to free the Prince, sends all the guards reeling magically, and exits.

It is "The Arab Spring" of 2011, and Qathafi is worried about the uprisings on his borders of Tunisia and Egypt. But he knows now the demonic desert "Djinni" are working against him, as he calls the pre-Islamic gods of the Sahara. He sends his overworked, bureaucratic Aide Dribrahim to find the Prince's father, a Tribal King named Zeid al-Psylli near al-Khums at the ancient Roman city of Leptis Magna, on the Mediterranean beach east of Tripoli, who may know where his son is being held prisoner.

Back in the jail cell in the next scene of Act 1, the disembodied Voice of the Prince summons the Angel Michael, in his classical heroic armor, to find out what Jibra'il is doing, and if she is working for his enemy, the ancient Egyptian god Set. It seems now the Prince may actually be the supreme deity Osiris, in his immortal Tomb.

Back in Libya, in the gloomy days of 2011, as War begins in the Revolution to overthrow Qathafi. The Prince flashbacks again - and is studying Catholicism in Rome with a Christian Brother Gaius, who thinks Jesus was really a fictional composite of Julius Caesar and Herod the Great, with lots of erudite scholarship, and the Prince loves all the theological and philosophical studies, as he is beginning to doubt his faith in Islam.

He brings Gaius to visit his father in the 60s, and they quarrel about Christianity and Islam, and father and son are estranged because of religion.

Zeid has gotten caught up in the War in 2011 meanwhile, as he was a general back in the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Israel. Qathafi kills him in a gun battle, and rapes Jibra'il (who is the goddess Isis, as well), ending Act 3.

Act 4 opens with the Prince in his elaborate Egyptian sarcophagus, as, fully now, the divine Osiris in death. The 2 Marine Guards stand over his Tomb. Michael and Gaius enter, much older and wiser now, and try to understand how this could have happened, and what was the real cosmogony and genealogy of the African deities.

Back at the final days of the War in 2011, Michael finally kills Qathafi, who is a pretender to the throne of Set, who supposedly killed Osiris in the Myths. Jibra'il has regained her power, as a mature woman again, and joins with Samina who had defected from Qathafi, and is the goddess Nephthys in the pre-Islamic cosmogony.

They all gather around the Tomb of Osiris, and pray for peace and an end to the fallacies of the modern Biblical and Quranic religions.

An all-Arabic cast, with Libyan translations by Mobruk al-Tuyat, the play is in pre-production. The book "The Libyad" is on sale in paperback and kindle on Amazon. (The Author lived in Tripoli for 3 years)