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January 14, 2005
TT: Invisible women
Friday again, and I'm in The Wall Street Journal with reviews of two off-Broadway plays, Heather Raffo's Nine Parts of Desire and Noël Coward's After the Ball.Nine Parts of Desire is nothing short of extraordinary:
How do we know what we think we know about life in Iraq? After the re-election of George W. Bush, the continued fighting there was the top news story of 2004, yet the agenda-driven, visually oriented accounts of the mainstream media had little to say about the everyday existence of the Iraqi people, and told us next to nothing about their feelings and fears. It is as though we were waging a war in a land populated by stick figures--which may help to explain why it is an artist who has done what so few reporters have even thought to do, and done it with a persuasiveness that fewer still could hope to rival.
Heather Raffo, the Iraqi-American playwright and performer of "Nine Parts of Desire," directed by Joanna Settle and now playing Off Broadway at Manhattan Ensemble Theater, brings us closer to the inner life of Iraq than a thousand slick-surfaced TV reports. Yet her beautifully shaped one-woman play is a play, not a stodgily earnest piece of documentary theater, and therein lies its singular force and compulsion: It is persuasive precisely because it is beautiful.
Ms. Raffo's enigmatic title is explained in her epigraph, a maxim of Ali ibn Abu Taleb, founder of the Shia sect and fourth leader of the Islamic world after Mohammed: "God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men." The nine characters she portrays are based on a large and diverse group of real-life women--a doctor, a painter who ran the Saddam Art Center, a left-wing political exile living in London, a young girl who loves the music of ‘N Sync--whom she interviewed over the past decade...We believe in their reality because Ms. Raffo inhabits each one so fully, both as actor and as author, and because we never feel, not even for a moment, that she is making them tell us what we--or she--want to hear.
After the Ball isn't that good, but I really liked it:
We don't get much Noël Coward in Manhattan, so it's a pleasure to point you to the Irish Repertory Theatre's vest-pocket Off Broadway production of "After the Ball," one of the Master's least well-known musicals. Originally produced in London in 1954, this is, amazingly enough, its American premiere, and the Irish Rep, despite the cruel limitations of its L-shaped house and miniature stage, has made the most of the tools at hand, turning a lavish operetta into an intimate entertainment that gives much satisfaction.
"After the Ball" is a musical version of Oscar Wilde's "Lady Windermere's Fan," an epigram-encrusted melodrama about a Woman with a Secret (it's the play in which Wilde famously defined a cynic as "a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing"). Coward kept the epigrams and added a batch of songs, mostly sentimental ballads à la "Bitter Sweet" rather than the crisply pointed comic numbers for which he is best remembered as a songwriter. Not all of them come from of his top drawer, but more than enough are good enough, and one, the droll "Something on a Tray," is (or ought to be) a Coward standard....
No link--the Journal doesn't give my stuff away for free. To read the whole thing (of which there's plenty more), buy today's paper at your neighborhood newsstand, or go here to subscribe to the online version of the Journal. It's worth it.
Posted January 14, 2005 12:01 PM
