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Published on 9/4/08
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Fact-based theatrical examinations of the current Iraq war have sprung up with remarkable rapidity, and from disparate, well-meaning sources. Tim Robbins’s Embedded, Gregory Burke’s Black Watch and David Hare’s Stuff Happens, to name a handful, have premiered in Los Angeles, Edinburgh and London, respectively.
But it’s probably safe to say that Heather Raffo is the only writer who started working on her play about the war a decade before it started. Raffo, an Iraqi-American writer and performer, was inspired by a 1993 visit to the Saddam Art Museum, an institution filled with reverent portraits of the dictator. She began interviewing Iraqi women with the idea of a piece about their experiences of the first Gulf War and Hussein’s regime. By the time of its 2003 premiere, well, stuff had happened.
9 Parts isn’t an anti-war polemic, though, at least not exclusively. Raffo portrays nine diverse Iraqi women; their views—on Saddam, on the U.S. and on the value of the war—are unexpectedly and disarmingly diverse.
Raffo gives a very impressive performance, transforming herself physically and vocally with precision, though emotionally she sometimes seems to be pushing. The play itself is well-structured, inasmuch as the intercutting of the women’s stories reinforces both their commonalities and their contradictions, but her effort to whip the distinct stories into a communal climax feels artificial. Still, separately and together, they’re well-told stories that deserve the telling.
