PARIS.- Theater-makers Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué have grown accustomed to life in exile. In 2013, the duo, who are creative as well as life partners, left their home country of Lebanon to settle in Berlin — out of “fatigue,” Majdalanie said recently.

The corruption and the frequent crises that rocked the Middle Eastern country had become too draining, she added. “When you see the same problems repeating themselves over and over again, you need distance to find peace,” she said.

The move worked — until the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel last year. Israel’s subsequent offensive in the Gaza Strip had a devastating knock-on effect on its relations with Lebanon, which is home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and their descendants.

Majdalanie and Mroué, who have long investigated Middle Eastern conflicts onstage, were critical of Israel’s retaliation. That made life uncomfortable in Germany, where many artists who find fault with Israel have, since Oct. 7, faced an increasingly hostile environment and accusations of antisemitism.

“Lebanon was home, then Berlin was home for a decade,” Majdalanie said. “Now, every day, we ask ourselves: Where to go now? Because we don’t know where home is anymore.”

For the next three months, they will have a temporary refuge in France. Through December, the Festival d’Automne à Paris, a long-running multidisciplinary event, is hosting a retrospective that showcases Majdalanie and Mroué’s long-standing commitment to grappling with contested political narratives.

The 14 productions on the program span over 20 years, starting with “Biokhraphia,” the duo’s 2002 mock interview, and include two new shows: “Four Walls and a Roof,” a play inspired by Bertolt Brecht, and a collaboration between Mroué and Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.

While the Paris retrospective has been in the works for several years, it arrives amid escalating fears of an all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Francesca Corona, the director of the Festival d’Automne, said that the season was well-timed “to give the audience sophisticated tools to decipher what is happening, and put it in historical context.”

Together and separately, since they also stage individual projects, over the past three decades Majdalanie, 58, and Mroué, 57, have touched on competing views of Lebanon’s internal conflicts, the Syrian revolution and sense of disillusionment among the couple’s peers across the Arab world. Their productions are typically economical, requiring little more than a table, chairs and some video projections. Some are even billed as “nonacademic lectures,” with the theater-makers addressing the audience directly to describe events or show documents.

“We don’t tell stories. We think together,” Mroué said. “We’re interested in what underpins events — the social, economic and political infrastructure.”

Politics intruded on their lives from a young age. Both were born to middle-class families in the 1960s, and Lebanon’s civil war — which lasted from 1975 to 1990 — was a constant throughout their youths. Mroué’s grandfather, Marxist philosopher Husayn Muruwwa, was assassinated by political opponents in 1987.

“I realized years later, when there was war with Israel, that some habits were ingrained in our bodies from that time,” Majdalanie said. “We always had a little bag in our bedroom with the essentials in case we had to flee.”

Yet their generation became so used to wartime life that the end of hostilities was a shock in itself, according to Mroué. “We started to meet the ‘others,’ the supposed enemy, and Beirut opened to the whole world. We were hungry for everything — we felt behind.”

By then, both had graduated from the theater program at Lebanese University, where they met and became a couple. As the 1990s went on, Majdalanie and Mroué became part of the newly bustling underground arts scene in Beirut and quickly moved away from “representing emotion mimetically, especially fear,” Majdalanie said: After years of conflict, it felt fake.

Instead, it was “far more important to dissect the political situation in Lebanon, what led to war,” Majdalanie said, but that meant working around Lebanon’s censorship rules, which required artists to submit plays to the Interior Ministry. In 1997, the duo stopped sending their work to authorities, having “noticed that little by little, we were censoring ourselves,” Mroué said.

To circumvent the system, they staged only two or three performances at a time, with no entrance fee or publicity, and the censors turned a blind eye.

Everything changed with “Who’s Afraid of Representation?,” a 2005 show that traces parallels between the sometimes violent performances of European artists like Marina Abramovic and Chris Burden and the story of a real-life Lebanese murderer. Majdalanie and Mroué suspect an audience member reported them to authorities, who then forced the pair to make extensive cuts to the show.

Two years later, in a show of defiance, Mroué submitted his next play, “How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fool’s Joke,” to officials. In it, four fighters who served in different militias discussed their contrasting memories of the civil war. Yet Mroué had carefully designed it so that “there was nothing in law that they could censor: no criticism of religion or the president, no sex or swearing.”

“It was fun to see their reaction, because they could not believe that someone would come with such a text,” Mroué recalled. The Interior Ministry banned the play, making international headlines in the process, then later backtracked.

By then, Mroué and Majdalanie’s work had grabbed the attention of programmers abroad. (Mroué also became known as a visual artist — a “completely different market and audience,” he said, adding that he still thinks of himself primarily as a theater artist.) Those international engagements helped the couple move to Berlin in 2013 — though they kept up with news from Lebanon “daily,” Mroué said. In 2019, when anti-corruption protests rocked the country, the pair was in the streets of Beirut, hopeful for change.

Five years later, a succession of new crises — the deadly 2020 blast at the port of Beirut, persistent economic instability, the renewed conflict with Israel — has left the couple despondent. “Every time we think it’s rock bottom,” Mroué said, before Majdalanie continued his thought: “There is no bottom.”

The events of Oct. 7, 2023, also took a toll on their creativity. For a while after the attack, crafting a new play in time for the Festival d’Automne retrospective seemed out of reach — until Brecht, the German playwright, came to mind.

Brecht also experienced repeated exile. After fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933, he ultimately settled in the United States, where his communist leanings were met with suspicion. In 1947, he was subpoenaed to appear in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and left the country for good the day after his testimony.

In “Four Walls and a Roof,” set to premiere in December, Majdalanie and Mroué delve into the HUAC trial through Brecht’s writings and photos from the playwright’s life in Germany and the United States. “It made us think of all those artists and intellectuals who leave their country to go to Europe, or North America, hoping to find freedom of speech, diversity, democracy — and who find themselves censored again there,” Majdalanie said.

As current events make their work ever harder, do they ever lose faith in theater? “Yes, of course,” Majdalanie said, letting out a full-bodied laugh. “We lose faith in everything from time to time.”

“What may have saved us is that we never thought theater was going to change the world,” she added. “All we can do is ask questions, and let the audience ponder them.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.