THEATRE REVIEW: 9 PARTS OF DESIRE
20 May'10

‘9 Parts’ a powerful production

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 4 out of 5

When all else fails, we often take comfort in the maxim, “This too shall pass” — a maxim that conjures visions of lights burning, however timorously, at the end of the longest, darkest tunnels of despair. But what if that light is merely the glow from an even worse conflagration than the one currently being endured — if the horror about to begin might make you think fondly of the horror you have just endured?

That’s the world of 9 PARTS OF DESIRE, a new play from Iraqi-American playwright Heather Raffo that opened Wednesday at the Theatre Centre, produced by Seventh Stage Theatre.

As its title implies, it is a play of nine parts — nine very individual women, connected only in shared desire for a better life, who endured the horrors of a brutal regime, only to see it replaced by a conqueror, unwilling or unable to set the world to rights. Under the direction of Kelly Straughan, 9 PARTS begins on a highly theatrical note, as eight of the nine actors enter a simple, all-encompassing set designed by Robin Fisher and Lindsay R. Forde to evoke the excesses of war.

Meanwhile, the ninth — Maryem Hassan Tollar — carries us to Iraq on the wings of her own music and sets us down on the banks of the historic Tigris River, a river that once offered succor to the very beginnings of civilization. In the past decades, however, it has born silent witness to mankind at his most uncivilized.

Along its length, these nine women stop in their daily activities to tell us of their despair — and, more rarely, of their hope. Most offer brief, harrowing glimpses into their lives. A mother (played by Lili Francks) who was the sole survivor of an horrific conflagration in a bomb shelter; a woman (played by Tollar) who sets the shoes of the dead afloat on the river in hopes of releasing their souls; a doctor (played by Aviva Armour-Ostroff) who worries about the future of a country whose soul seems to have been genetically altered.

There are other deeply affecting stories as well, and thanks to the committed work of actors like Anusree Roy (playing a woman surviving on hope), Brittany Kay (as a young girl only beginning to plumb despair) and Toni Ellwand (as a woman prepared to sell her very soul), they are each realized with touching honesty and compassion. Others have larger stories to tell, however, and these stories take time and repeat visits to spin themselves out. Layal (played by Christine Aubin Khalifah) is an artist who works in both the medium of watercolours and the medium of survival, while Huda (Deborah Grover) is an aging activist who, through distance and experience, seems to have lost her vision of a better world. And finally, there is the woman identified only as the American, played by Melissa-Jane Shaw, — a woman who, one suspects, is speaking from the playwright’s heart as she suffers through the agony of her country from the safety of her New York home.

In an otherwise strong production, director Straughan’s strange decision to place this character at the very back of the theatre is just shy of tragic, transforming what one suspects might be a fine performance of a fine part into little more than a bit part in a radio play for much of the audience. But even if this production doesn’t quite equal the sum of all its parts, it still adds up to something powerful. It’s a less-than-silent testament to lives lived with eyes fixed hopefully on that light at the end of the tunnel, in the hope — if not the belief — that this too shall pass.