Two off-Broadway plays I liked very much are closing very soon. If you haven’t seen them, do:
– Heather Raffo’s Nine Parts of Desire closes May 22. Here’s part of what I wrote about it in The Wall Street Journal:
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, and she evokes their dissimilar personalities (and appearances) with a precision reminiscent of Jefferson Mays’ high-wire acts of multiple impersonation in “I Am My Own Wife.” Each one is wholly believable, but not in the straight-from-the-transcript manner of such exercises in theatrical polemic as “Guant