"Nine Parts of Desire"

Theatre review
"Nine Parts of Desire" at the Kitchen Theatre
Ithaca Times
December 12, 2007
768 words
"Lone Survivors"

full text here

Lone Survivors
By: Mark Tedeschi
12/12/2007

Shia Islam founder Amam Ali said, "God created sexual desire in 10 parts; he gave nine parts to women and one to men." (I suppose I should be offended at the blanket generalization of one-dimensionality, but for some reason, I'm not.) His quote is the genesis for the title of the Kitchen Theatre's current mainstage production, Nine Parts of Desire.

Nine Parts was written and originally performed by Iraqi-American playwright and actress Heather Raffo. Here, the actress-director team of Lanna Joffrey and Carmel O'Reilly unite again - they worked together on this piece last year in Boston - and they've collaborated with the creative staff at the Kitchen to generate a moving, intense, and overall remarkable production.

Raffo's creation of the work stems from her visits to women of different social situations in Iraq. Their stories provided the basis for the nine separate, completely unique characters in Nine Parts. Joffrey meanders, drifts, rushes, and creeps to and fro across the stage, entering different spaces and lighting schemes while drastically altering her clothing, hair, and voice dozens of times throughout the show.

There isn't a straight story to Nine Parts as much as there is an arc of immediacy to the monologues delivered. Joffrey addresses the audience as if they were a pair of ready-to-listen Western ears and avoids pigeonholing her listeners into stereotypes by avoiding them herself; she plays characters we can identify with, but who clearly have their own specific experiences and biases to relay.

Some of the memorable characters include an Iraqi woman who lost her entire family from an American bombing, a pseudo-intellectual British woman sporting a grey blazer and a flask of Scotch, a teenage Iraqi girl in an *NSYNC t-shirt obsessed with American pop culture, a nurse in an Iraqi ward, an elderly hunchbacked merchant, and an Iraqi-American woman with relatives to whom she can't get closer than a long-distance telephone call.

The women all profess a unified quality: an unquantifiable love that can only be touched upon by language heavy with imagery and emotion.

The scenery intensifies the words. The background consists of empty white frames over splashes of white, black, and midnight blue paint and a winding river that connects at the ground, where the river turns into a real-life waterway, splitting the dusty tile floor to make way for a narrow creek in the middle of the stage. Woven baskets of clothing on the ground give Joffrey a few places to extract and deposit her many fluid wardrobe changes.

Nine Parts is a challenging undertaking for an actress, to say the least, so it's almost obvious to say that Joffrey holds her own. But she knows the material intimately and, as far as I could tell on opening night, flawlessly. She visits all the corners of emotion in this show, and will surely hold your attention steadfast for 90 minutes.

Joffrey's musings and stories become most relevant, understandably, when she addresses Americans' attitudes about the war in Iraq. An American character criticizes her friend for calling the war "heartbreaking" while she enjoyed a pedicure; then the character remembers she was getting a pedicure at the time, too. "I am so stressed out," she says. "Maybe I should take a yoga class."

It's indeed depressing to think that we live in a country responsible for irreparable destruction in Iraq, and it's even more frustrating to think most of us physically can't be part of the solution -and if there were a solution, the complete arresting of daily life in America wouldn't be part of it.

The graphic description of some probably true horrors sounds a bit gratuitous - does their existence alone merit their mention? - but in a production with such close attention to language, I have to give the benefit of the doubt; Raffo is not trying to incite a revolution, but rather to stir up conversation.

I also question her depiction of Iraqi (and Iraqi-American) women's perceived glossing over of the American involvement in Iraq. Judging by all the devastation the characters have detailed, wouldn't the vast majority of Iraqis be consistently furious with Americans? But again, Raffo would know better than I; perhaps it's a temporary coping mechanism to perceive bombings in nearby towns as a form of entertainment. Few people can claim knowledge of what people in other parts of the world truly think about Americans.

There is at least one assertion that's absolute: "You have our war inside you now," she tells us. She's right; the Iraq war is already a part of our history, and historical events inspire important conversations - and so will Nine Parts of Desire.