A scene from 9 Parts of Desire.
9 Parts of Desire
- Written by Heather Raffo
- Directed by Kelly Straughan
- Starring Aviva Armour-Ostroff, Christine Aubin Khalifah, Toni Ellwand, Lili Francks, Deborah Grover, Maryem Hassan Tollar, Brittany Kay, Anusree Roy and Melissa-Jane Shaw
- At the Theatre Centre in Toronto
When Heather Raffo's 9 Parts of Desire made its debut in 2003, it had timeliness on its side. Coming in the same year as the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, its stories of modern Iraqi women had a burning relevance. Not surprisingly, the play was a success in London and New York, where British and American audiences were especially keen to understand the Middle Eastern nation that their governments had chosen to attack.
The belated Canadian premiere, by Toronto's Seventh Stage Productions, has no such urgency. Stripped of its topicality, you can now see the play's flaws. Raffo's writing is repetitive, overwrought and at times only semi-coherent. In this production, the piece also loses its tour-de-force appeal. The original was a solo performance in which one actor (Raffo) portrayed nine women of different ages and backgrounds. Director Kelly Straughan's staging employs nine actors, which draws attention to the weaknesses of some of the characterizations.
Nonetheless, there are still vivid moments and compelling voices. U.S.-born Raffo, who is part Iraqi, based her work on interviews with real women and the play paints a complex picture of their lives. Her characters include a tough old communist (Deborah Grover) who suffered through the 1963 coup that brought Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party to power; a defiant artist (Christine Aubin Khalifah) who dares to paint female nudes in a Muslim society; a restless teenager (Brittany Kay) who listens to American boy bands and collects spent bullets like trinkets; a Basra doctor (Aviva Armour-Ostroff) who despairs at the terrible birth defects caused by fallout from the 1991 Gulf War.
In Seventh Stage's show, the standouts are Anusree Roy's Amal, the plump, candid Bedouin woman who confides her love affairs, and Toni Ellwand's Nanna, the old peddler who has no qualms about selling artifacts looted from Baghdad's museums. "I have to eat," she says frankly. Egyptian-Canadian singer-musician Maryem Hassan Tollar, meanwhile, gives the production an air of authenticity, both in her role as Mullaya, a professional mourner, and in her keening musical score.
Finally, though, you can't help being reminded that Canadian playwrights have written more powerful plays, both about Iraq (Judith Thompson's Palace of the End) and about war-torn Middle Eastern countries in general (Wajdi Mouawad's Scorched). In comparison, 9 Parts of Desire comes off as a well-meaning but uneven work, and its impact diminishes as time goes by.
9 Parts of Desire runs until Sunday.