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Friday, April 20, 2007
‘Nine Parts of Desire’ @ Horizon
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Heather Raffo’s “Nine Parts of Desire” scorches the soul like bombs falling on Baghdad.
Interwoven stories of Iraqi women whose lives have been shattered by war, the play is that rare breed of theatrical animal that makes difficult political statements by sketching human portraits —- and keeping them real.
Consider Layal, the promiscuous artist-diva who sleeps with tyrants. Or the little girl annoyed by the power outage that stops her ‘N Sync video. Or the expatriate who lives in New York watching the war on CNN, then witnesses hell come crashing down on 9/11. How ironic that her family in Michigan never calls but that her Iraqi uncles phone from halfway around the world to say, “I love you.”
These are some of the more palatable images to emerge from Horizon Theatre’s devastating production of Raffo’s lavishly praised one-woman show, which director Lisa Adler has masterfully restructured as an ensemble piece for three top-tier Atlanta actresses playing nine different parts. From scene to scene, Carolyn Cook, Marianne Fraulo and Suehyla El-Attar glide in and out of their traditional black robes as if they were second skins.
Harder to swallow is the Iraqi doctor who keeps delivering two-headed babies and uncovering cancer everywhere. Or the woman who indicts America with a screed of truth:
You have our war now inside you … we tether you to something so old you cannot see it we have you chained to the desert to your blood you carry it in you —- it’s lifetimes.
Just when you thought Atlanta theater had collapsed once and for all into a state of doldrums and indifference, along comes this deeply unsettling meditation on love, loss, despair, shame, death and acquiescence. A tapestry of composite sketches based on interviews Raffo conducted in Iraq beginning in 1993, “Nine Parts of Desire” is a bitter dose of meds. It’s also the most achingly affecting show of the 2006-2007 season, the perfect bookend to the Alliance Theatre season opener, “Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue.”
If you can see only one play this year, this is it.
El-Attar, in particular, will tear you to bits, first as the lovelorn, overweight, 38-year-old Amal, a Bedouin who sees with her heart, not her eyes. Then as the little Iraqi girl who can tell when bombs will strike by the way they hiss and cries when she sees “papa Saddam” on TV —- “because he stole my father so I thought he was bigger than anyone but he didn’t even fight to death.” To hear another of her characters scream “I love you” more than 20 times in a row and sound different in every instance, is as remarkable as it is upsetting. That El-Attar can dig so deep is astonishing.
Cook is mesmerizing as the lusty painter who can’t resist her erotic impulse and can’t dream of leaving Iraq. “I fear it here, and I love it here.” Ultimately, that love will rip her in two.
Though Fraulo’s accents can seem a little canned, she’s got a singular voice that rises and rumbles and erupts like a volcano. God only knows where it comes from, where it’s going. As Mulaya, the woman who throws old shoes into the river, Fraulo is a Joycean force of nature. “The river is the color of worn soles,” she says at one point. And later: “I have holes in my shoes. I have holes in my feet. There are holes everywhere, even in this story.”
Though Celeste Miller’s movement design can seem a little precious, scenic designer Tamara McElhannon’s Arab-inspired set looks as lovely as a miniature Fox Theatre, and Katy McCreary’s lighting is as soft as moonbeams.
In seeking out literature that enlightens us about the world beyond our borders (witness the recent “Homebody/Kabul,” “The Syringa Tree” and El-Attar’s “The Perfect Prayer”), Horizon has done a vast community service.
Part poem, part prayer, part promise, “Nine Parts of Desire” is a lamentation for a world that has run hopelessly amok. It is a brutal, breathtaking and wholly necessary observation about peace and freedom turned inside out.
THE VERDICT: The best show in town, and the hardest to watch.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Fridays; 8:30 p.m. Saturdays; 5 p.m. Sundays. Through May 13. $20-$25. Horizon Theatre, 1083 Austin Ave., Little Five Points. 404-584-7450, horizontheatre.com.
