Nine Parts of Desire
Written and performed by Heather Raffo
Directed by Joanna Settle
Arena Stage
Through Nov. 12
By Alexander C. Kafka
Heather Raffo's Nine Parts of Desire has received rave reviews on its path from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2003 through London and New York on its way to D.C. What might read like hyperbole turns out to be simply accurate reporting. Raffo's one-woman dramatic portrait gallery of Iraqi women in the midst and wake of two wars is an astonishing theatrical tour de force. Richly imagined, poetically written, superbly acted, and masterfully directed with the aid of a first-rate technical team, it's not to be missed. It will leave you emotionally wrung, politically disoriented, and artistically dazzled.
Raffo, a Midwesterner with an American mother and Iraqi father, started concocting the performance in 1993 on a trip to visit her dozens of relatives in Iraq. Some of these encounters became a master's thesis for her M.F.A. in the acting program at the University of San Diego. She has developed and updated it since, from its New York production under the guidance of director Joanna Settle.
To describe what it is, perhaps it's best to start by describing what it's not. Its approach is not journalistic in writing or interpretation. We aren't hearing transcriptions, but characters; not impersonations—though in voice, accent, carriage, and mannerism, Raffo's portrayals are exceptional—but melded types and histories. Nor is the play just a tribute to heroic women—though it's often that too. These are flawed women—a politically compromised, narcissistic, maritally unfaithful painter favored by Saddam Hussein, for instance; an emigre in London who's fled violence and oppression right into a whiskey bottle.
It's not a plain leftist political cri de coeur, either. "In '58 everyone who was intelligent was communist," pronounces the London emigre. But her politics are more conflicted now, and so, for certain, are the play's. We hear of an American bunker-busting bomb killing hundreds of innocents in a shelter, and of the dire genetic consequences for Iraqis of American depleted-uranium weapons. But we hear just as much about Saddam's sons and henchmen beheading women the dictator made into his prostitutes, or setting dobermans upon a stripped, honey-slathered out-of-favor girlfriend of Uday's, or forcing a mother to see her infant devoured by starving cats. If there's a clear indictment of America, it's more of our blundering gigantism, military and otherwise, our compartmentalized world consciousness, and our self-limiting routine and superficiality. "People they work out to the war on three channels," says the Iraqi-American New Yorker who seems to be at least in part a stand-in for Raffo. Says the painter, in explaining how she couldn't leave her war-torn Baghdad: "What are you creating with your freedom? I am more free than you."
And finally, it's not a linear narrative, though there are traces of story arc spotted fleetingly like the traces of flying shells in night-vision green. The first character we meet—an older woman mending old souls through the washing of old shoe soles in the river—warns that there are holes in those soles, and in her feet, and in her story. And that's true. For, as I said, this is a portrait gallery more than a traditional play. More than a sketch pad, mind you. More like the translucent, unfocused figures of the painter's watercolors (she is among the most vivid characters, perhaps, because she is emblematic of the artistic strategy and vision of the production). She says, "With oil, you just paint over what you've done." (The associations with that oil paint are with an oil economy and heavy-handed foreign and military policy seeking to redo and undo in single bold gestures.) Watercolor, on the other hand, is never black and white. Figures are never utterly distinct from their backgrounds or surrounding people or objects. Nor are Raffo's portrait subjects here.
The title comes from a seventh-century imam: "God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one part to men." And it is these women's sexuality writ large that unifies them over borders, time, country, sect, and circumstance. In the painter's case, it is sexuality as lust and the freedom to lust. To be free to be with whom she wants, to be free of being taken by whom she doesn't, and perhaps most of all to be free of judgmental assumptions—Arab or Western, religious or secular urbane—about that freedom. She wishes to be free, also, of saintly expectations. "I'm a good artist," she says in her matter-of-factly cape-flinging, cosmopolitan way, "I'm an OK mother, I'm a miserable wife."
A cheerfully forthright Bedouin character's desires are more idealistic—to be with her one true love. And if, in so doing, she has to discard the last couple men she thought were her true loves, so be it.
The woman who gives us a tour of the shelter where more than 400 innocents died is, in this context, sexual in a more fundamentally biological and philosophical way. She gives her name only as the Mother of Tomorrow. Tomorrow was her daughter, one of the victims of the incineration. The dark overtones abound. For in her no-nonsense description of the tragedy, in her remembrance, she is the mother of tomorrow who sustains the images of an Iraqi life that could be sweet and normal, the kind of images that wars erase. But she's also the mother of tomorrow in that others, if not she, might also harbor the bitter resentments that could lead to tomorrow's escalations and retaliations.
My quibbles with the script: One might wish a little less contrivance in the 'N Sync-dancing teen's discovery of her disappeared father's journals, or a little more clarity in the distinctions between the older Baghdad women.
But forgive me as I gush a little about Raffo's talents as an actress.
As that same Justin Timberlake-smitten teen, she evinces a lively girlishness even as the school-deprived character describes her heartbreaking education in the sounds made by different weapons from America and Russia. As a doctor bemoaning the number of deformed babies being born (apparently because of remnants of depleted-uranium weapons) and her legless husband at home, Raffo cuts our consciences to the quick. Contrasting Iraqi healthcare in its heyday to its state now, the doctor says, "What are we now? We're the experiment."
Depicting the Bedouin woman, Raffo's high, quavering voice, heavy posture, and beckoning conversational hand gestures made me think of a young Streep, and "a young Streep" is a phrase I weigh like precious metal. How Raffo has kept up these performances year after year is a gripping mystery in itself—you worry for her even as you applaud for her. Though it doesn't sound, from an excellent profile in today's Post, like that's where she's headed, I can only wish Raffo a long rest around Thanksgiving followed by a dipsy role in a light living-room comedy.
Settle's direction wisely relaxes into the rich moments, and with the virtuoso immediacy of lighting designer Peter West and sound designer Obadiah Eaves, tears through the transitions like the breathlessly turned pages of a quality graphic novel or the scene-change "wipe" of a film. Antje Ellermann's set is authentically artful and artfully authentic, using water, distressed tiled floors, scaffolding, battered and broken soot-bordered walls, sandbags, and rugs to mirror a variety of physical and psychic locales. Kasia Walicka Maimone's layered costumes enable Raffo to grow and shed her textile skins with the necessary alacrity and character conviction.
Whatever most of us Americans create with our freedom, Raffo has created a stunning piece of art with hers. I can only imagine the D.C. run will add to her list of awards and nominations. When the applause dies down, though, will we take all from Nine Parts of Desire that we've been given? The painter character says of America and Americans—with equal parts satisfaction and pity—"We have you chained to the desert." Will we become wiser there—it happens sometimes in books, after all—or merely more dizzy and desperate?
Photo by Irene Young, courtesy of Arena Stage
