"Where have you been?" he asks. You mean "Where have I been?" Em ... OK. I've been here and there, round and about. With the nicer weather, outside a lot and losing the desire to write. But, feeling guilty, and not wanting to disappoint my legion of Blog-er-ees, and having a few spare minutes, and wanting to put off some intense manual labor which calls from my backyard, I'm trying my hand at this post.
Saw a great and very moving play last week: Nine Parts Of Desire. A one-woman show at the Manhattan Ensemble Theater (55 Mercer Street; 212-947-8844). Created and acted by Heather Raffo; she portrays nine different Iraqi women and brings them to life in front of your eyes in one hour and fifteen minutes of intensely emotional drama. Carved from interviews of real Iraqi women over a period of 11 years, the playwright, half Iraqi herself, endows her subjects with respect and dignity. We can feel the horrors of the war through the eyes and experiences of each of these women. While this is not an anti-war play in and of itself, one cannot see it and walk away without feeling the anguish and terror that these women have experienced at the bloody hands of Saddam Hussein and the American terror that has followed his regime.
Particularly moving was Raffo's portrayal of an Iraqi doctor, herself a cancer victim, as she relates to us the enormous number of breast cancer cases she has seen in young Iraqi girls - toddlers and pre-teens - the result of depleted uranium bullets and ammunition so widely used by U.S. forces in Iraq and now littering vast areas of that devastated country. Another woman who, day and night, stands in testimony outside a demolished bomb shelter, now takes her daughter's name as her own, the daughter and so many others having perished inside at the hands of American smart bombs that were unleashed on the civilians inside.
This is a fast-paced play as the actor, who establishes a great rapport with her audience, takes us from one woman to the next and back again. By the play's end I felt as if I actually knew these women and that they had been telling their stories of horror and woe directly to me. If you're able to get tickets, this is a play that I highly recommend.
Heather Raffo plays nine different Iraqi women in Nine Parts Of Desire.(Photo: Joan Marcus)
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