Upon rereading, my review of 9 Parts of Desire may have been a little too positive. There are definitely problems with the play, especially in its relationship to its intended audience. I was initially impressed by what the play managed to do correctly and the versatility of the actress, but then the lacunae became more apparent.

Firstly, class is only tangentially dealt with in the play. Yes some of the 9 women are poor, but in Raffo’s scramble to give them strength and agency, she didn’t really address the relationship between them — which women enable the oppression of the others? What are the political forces that are relevant to them? It’s set up as a Baathist/Saddam versus American/Bush conflict, but that is a gross oversimplification, as the news points out. We’re given 9 snapshots of women but only the finest of threads stitching together their relationships to each other.

This is further complicated by the choice of these 9 snapshots. As I tried to argue with an acquaintance last night, someone will take issue with any finite number of images you take as “representative” of the spectrum of Iraqi women. Her complaint was that the choices were stereotypical — drunken expatriate, politically opportunistic artist, helpless 2nd generation immgrant. I think the more accurate criticism is that there weren’t very many complicated images, contradictions that couldn’t be fully explained by the text. To a degree, the women were textbook-logical. Even an irrationall impulse could be explained. It comes off a little pat, and thus non-representative.

Finally, there is the issue of catharsis. This play is playing in wealthy leftist Berkeley, and there is a real danger (and I’m sure it happened to many people) they they will go to see this play and feel like they have experienced the pain of these women and can now be cleansed of their guilt from complicity/ignorance/etc. I heard some paper called it an uplifting theatrical event, a feel-good play. It should have been more disturbing or challenging to avoid that. But you can’t control an audience’s reception that finely.

Was it worth seeing? I still think so. It’s standard practice to dislike all theater on some grounds, but my general feelings are positive, albeit shot through with some concerns. It’s too bad it closes today so nobody else gets to see it. But onward and upward, as they say.

I managed to catch this play at the Berkeley Rep last night. It’s a one-woman show by Heather Raffo, this time performed by Mozhan marn;ograve;. The play tells 9 Iraqi women’s stories, from an Iraqi-American obsessively watching the news for images of her extended family to a woman selling scavenged goods on the street, from an artist who painted Saddam’s portrait and is now asked to make a mosaic of Bush’s face on the floor of a hotel to the lone survivor of a bomb shelter that was mistakenly bombed by the Americans, vaporizing the bodies of those within.

The play’s most powerful device, used again and again without seeming old, is the simple statement of an atrocity. It is a kind of alienation that Brechtian manipulation can never accomplish. Hooda, an older expat living in London, is a pacifist who is for the war because Saddam ruined her country and “this war it was personal.” She tells us of her time in prison before fleeing Iraq. “They get to you by torturing those around you,” she tells us, and describes how a man was forced to listen to a tape of his wife being raped while their 3-month-old baby was placed in a bag with hungry cats. Layal, the artist, describes how her friend was taken by Uday, stripped naked, covered in honey, and fed to his dogs. This is what their lives are like, and in that matter-of-fact tone we are made to understand that we cannot possibly know what it is like to experience that.

The only moments that didn’t really work for me were at the end, where I felt like the sound levels were such that I couldn’t make out the text, and the moment where Layal smashes her supplies. In the latter, the transition is so abrupt that I couldn’t really make out why she snapped then. In the former, I was mostly disappointed because that is the moment in which everything is tied together before the denouement. All of the lines from the play come back through the tongue of Mulaya, the mourner. Nanna, the street seller, complains: “I have too much existence. Our history is finish.” Amal the Bedouin loves “with her heart, not with her eyes.” It’s a goldmine for drawing the piece together as a collective outcry against this existence, this injustice, and this horror that face these women, and it felt rushed and hard to decipher.

But no performance is perfect, and the positives in 9 Parts of Desire far outweigh the negatives. Marnò’s face is chameleonlike — she has a real gift for transformation, much like Sarah Jones. A program note that I read afterwards noted that the way in which a woman wears her abaya, her robe, tells us much about her class and her politics. It’s a simple signifier that allows the actress to physicalize her relationship to her politics, differentiate characters, and build a visual vocabulary, constrained by a single garment.

Unfortunately, the show closes this weekend (to make way for Culture Clash’s Zorro In Hell, which I am really excited about). But if it comes your way, definitely watch it. It changed my friend’s view of solo performance, and it may change yours.