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Truly, Seattlest walked into the opening of 9 Parts of Desire at the Rep with trepidation, well-founded in experience, about tremendously topical one-person shows. And when it began with a woman at a river telling us about dumping shoes with "worn out soles" in the water (say it to yourself, "worn out soles," savor the homonymity), we slouched a bit in our seat.
But after five minutes, we spent the rest of the evening leaning forward over the balcony rail, and our attention never wandered, even though the person sitting behind us (to our left) dropped their program on the floor three times throughout the evening. Other people glanced up crossly, but we did not. We were wrapped up in this Heraclitean tale of fiery passion everywhere and wells of compassion trapped beneath the ground.
Critics from the New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times (and Seattle Times) agree it's must-see. The show is based on Heather Raffo's interviews with a number of different Iraqi women of different backgrounds and ages, an unlucky-in-love Bedouin, a doctor worried about birth defects, a painter who was known for portraits of Saddam, a young girl whose father "vanished," a bitter older expatriate living in London, an Iraqi-American watching TV to see if her family is alive, a woman who witnessed an American bunker-busting bomb take out a bomb shelter crowded with Iraqi civilians.
The lead role, which Raffo has performed herself, is performed in Seattle by the phenomenal Najla Said (the daughter of the late Edward Said, if we're not mistaken). It's a tour-de-personality performance; she doesn't get much time to switch from character to character, but in the space of a breath she steps from accent to accent -- we could even hear a little street Brit in the Bedouin woman who'd lived in London with her first husband -- and from world-weary cosmopolite to naive pre-teen.
The show runs through April 15. [UPDATE: Due to popular demand, it's been extended to April 23.] You can buy tickets online or by calling 206-443-2222. They're just $30 for adults, $10 for under-25, $22 for seniors.
One of the best things about the show is that it's performed in the Rep's much more intimate Leo K. theatre. The set itself is a mixture of a bombed-out building, a river/fountain, and marketplace, draped with plastic sheeting on clothesline -- all fairly luxurious for a one-person show, but it went a long way in helping set the scenes.
Said manages to turn a limited wardrobe into a host of apparel options, and her body language is always pitch-perfect: wearing a shawl, her arms move from the elbow down. From the elbow up, they're glued to her sides. As a market seller, she squats like a stone; as a bubblegum-pop infatuated girl she's worked out a whole dance routine from MTV memory. And it's not just the accents -- her voice's timbre and cadence are instrumental, too.
All this talent goes to serve the voices of women who have something real to say, to share, at times funny, outraged, achingly sad, or bone-weary. We don't want to give away the stories, but trust us that's it's not -- as perhaps you might think -- an anti-war polemic. (The play does do a very good job of capturing the human cost of war, no matter how it is prosecuted, and an even better job of conveying that information as shared conversation, rather than proclamations from the moral high ground.) It is about being able to speak at all.
There's a reverse to this multitude of perspective, which is that it comes from a single person, and as difficult as it must be for the actress to deliver emotionally, this is what makes the play work, that it recapitulates its author's need to respond after having heard so much. (At the reception after, Najla said there'd been a lot of crying during rehearsal.) Raffo says her impression is that, with all this pressure, something has to blow. Her play is just that volcanic.
Coincidentally, we ran into the Seattle Opera's Jonathan Dean at the performance, who was there with Wooden O Theatre's managing director, Vanessa Miller. Reviewing the program, Jonathan discovered the play was written by the same Heather Raffo he attended Okemos High School with. They were in a few plays together there, and he recalls that Raffo was voted "Most Dramatic" in the yearbook. So they nailed that one.
(Photos © 2006 Chris Bennion)
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