Nine Parts of Desitre at Performance Network

Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times today suggests that we may be on the edge of an economic abyss, the kind that would produce chaos, ripping apart the lives of many Americans. Heather Raffo’s one-woman play, “Nine Parts of Desire,” directed with crisp precision and a careful eye to character by Ed Nahhat, now at the Performance Network, shows us how nine very different Iraqi women cope with the kind of political disorder that yanks out from under them the expectations of their accustomed lives. Sarab Kamoo’s passionate and carefully etched profiles of the women lets us see and feel their frustration, bravado, anger, hope, despair, and grudging acceptance, yet this production doesn’t tell us how to react. Kamoo’s nine characterizations are neither sentimental nor brutal, but brutally honest.

Monika Essen’s lovely and useful set puts you at once somewhere in the Middle East but has only one specific location: a flowing stream downstage right that has you hoping for a Middle Eastern Huck Finn to sit down and drop a line.

Raffo, an American of Iraqi heritage, wrote the play after ten years of interviews with Iraqi women. It could have been a polemic against war, but it’s about women living as best they can in their suddenly dangerous world.

A human life is very short in the grand sweep of history. The fortunate, born into comfort and privilege, come to consider as birthright the lives in which they were brought up. Some die never having known anything else. But history is relentless and those on the cusp of changing times are its victims, their expectations dashed, their lives filled with new and powerful dangers. We don’t have to reach back to the Holocaust for examples. In recent times, the abyss of ruined lives has appeared in Bosnia, Durfur, Iraq, New Orleans, and Manhattan, among others. Once civilized cities like Beirut and Baghdad have become horror zones. We are all on the edge of the cliff and maintain equilibrium only by refusing to look down.

Yet, people in disarray find ways to survive: religion, anger, work, whiskey. Since the end of the Great Depression and the Second World War we’ve lived in anticipation of continued plenty, our fortunes borne aloft by an economy supported mainly by expectation. Now we may be facing the abyss. How will we cope? Many will go on like Heather Raffo’s nine women. Does survival trump ethics? The comfortable have one answer, victims another. Listen to them before you decide.