9 Parts of Desire is a play that leaves you grasping for adjectives. Remarkable, moving, powerful? Yes, all of those. Yet even the word that comes closest to the mark has been devalued by overuse:

Devastating.

Before the performance begins, devastation greets you from a stage strewn with rubble and sandbags and dominated by the façade of an Iraqi building broken in half, stand-in for a nation bent by tyranny and shattered by wars. But not destroyed. History is in pieces, but it's still there, all of it. All the way back to Babylon.

Written and performed by Heather Raffo, the play is a series of monologues by nine female characters. Eight of them are Iraqi and the ninth, like the playwright, an American of Iraqi descent. Together, they weave a tapestry of experiences bound by shared tragedies and a fierce will to survive.

There is a doctor battling an epidemic of birth defects. The sole survivor from a bomb shelter destroyed in the first Gulf War who serves as a tour guide to the tomb that holds her entire family. An erudite émigré guzzling scotch in London as she agonizes over the scars of Saddam Hussein's reign of terror and the costs of the war that deposed him. An artist who bought her freedom with her body and her talent, painting propaganda portraits for monsters.

As an actor, Raffo isn't the impeccably trained virtuoso who disappears into accents, but her performance is all the more powerful because the writer's own identity and experiences shine through. The monologues are exquisitely crafted but somehow never smell of artifice. Instead, they bring the audience into a world that feels all too real.

This isn't an easy play to watch. But it's an important one because it digs beneath the bird's-eye politics and draws the audience into the realm of lived experience. It's harrowing, but what it has to teach is essential.

Author: Kerry Lengel
Source: The Arizona Republic