lillete Dubey’s play at the META fest gave a glimpse of women’s survival and struggle in a repressive country. By Utpal K Banerjee
Heather Raffo, a young Iraqi-American litterateur, is justly famous for her notable creation of the one-woman play, 9 Parts of Desire. The play focusses on the lives of women in her father’s homeland, and was originally conceived in 1993, after a visit to her Iraqi relatives. It was also inspired by Raffo’s trip to the Saddam Art Centre in Baghdad where she saw only billboard-sized portraits of Saddam Hussein. later, in a back room, she saw a painting of a nude woman clinging to a barren tree. She took a photo of the painting, returned to America and devised a way of replicating the painting into a play. A decade later, she came out with her work, which features monologues by nine highly-distinct Iraqi women.
Made into a hit play — both in New York’s Off-Broadway and london’s Off-West End — 9 Parts of Desire has had all the roles performed by Raffo herself. It details the lives of those women that span the decades between the first and second Gulf Wars and occupation. Described by critics as “an example of how art can remake the world,” it is a fascinating portrait of the extraordinary — and ordinary — lives of a whole cross-section of Iraqi women and delves into the many conflicting aspects of what it means to be a woman in a country: overshadowed by war. About the play, Raffo’s own comments are: “I want audiences to understand how difficult it is to grasp the psyche of people who have lived under Saddam for 30 years with American support, then had a war with Iran, resulting in 1.5 million deaths, followed by 13 years of sanctions and two wars under American fire-power…”
9 Parts Of Desire, presented by Primetime Theatre Company in the recent Mahindra Theatre Festival, is the play’s first augury in India, where a single actor performs through the entire play. Directed by lillete Dubey, the play has her TV-hostess and actress-daughter, Ira Dubey, essaying all the nine Iraqi women, belonging to a cross-section of society. After a prelude — a promenade through the proscenium as a war-widow looking for her forgotten pieces of memorabilia — Ira begins her marathon role-playing: a sexy artist, ruminating on her delectable past; a sincere doctor, doing her best for those ravaged by war; an ageing communist, still clinging to her red flag; a bomb-blast victim, desperately looking for her relatives; a teenage girl, romping and skipping around in all innocence: a TV addict, living with her idiot-box; a social derelict surviving on her whisky; a hopelessly-lost woman sans memory and others.
Through each of their stories — deliberately left incomplete by the playwright — one glimpses into the survival and struggle of women in a war-torn, repressive country. Most stories are fractured chronicles: to reveal how politics and situations not in one’s control can still change one’s destiny. A particularly haunting image is one of a nubile girl picked up from her school, taken to Saddam to become his “sex-slave” for a while, and then quietly pushed to the streets into prostitution.
As the solo protagonist, Ira shines at many levels from fluently switching between Iraqi, British and American accents, to catching the subtle nuances: swinging from a school girl to an old woman and displaying them convincingly, Ira executes this Herculean task formidably. Her focus is mainly on her body-language and voice — modulation; she does not pay much attention to her looks, and yet it works.
lillete, as director, introduces a personal note, “It was a delight to discover a wonderfully talented new woman writer and direct Ira in her role — yes a sisterhood of a kind! Fearless women both, who I salute: Heather, for her tender, sensitive, but incisive examination of her strife-ridden fabled land, whose woes — on the individual and political leve — resonate across the world; Ira, for her sheer courage and tremendous hard work to enter an unknown world: both the ‘solo’ space as an actor, and the begiling and complex arena of an Iraqi woman. I thank them both.”