Heather Raffo in a scene from "Nine Parts of Desire" (photo © Irene Young)

Face to Face
Heather Raffo: Exploring the Complexity of Identity
By Simi Horwitz
Backstage Magazine, Nov. 2, 2004


Actor Heather Raffo asserts she did not write her one-person show, "Nine Parts of Desire," in which she stars, as a vehicle for herself. Its creation emerged from a much deeper place: her identity—and pain—as a woman of Iraqi heritage.

"I'm an American, but I became aware of myself as an Iraqi—had a sense of myself as 'the other' -- for the first time during the Gulf War," Raffo recalls. "I'd walk down the street and overhear people saying, 'Let's go fuck the Iraqis.' I realized from that point on that my cousins in Iraq—family whom I loved—would be viewed by many Americans as dark and dirty. I also realized that the only difference between my cousins and myself was the accident of where we were born. That was my loss of innocence and, in a way, the beginning of this piece, although I didn't start writing it until I was in graduate school at the University of San Diego. It was my master's thesis."

"Nine Parts of Desire," which bowed Off-Broadway at the Manhattan Ensemble Theater on Wed., Oct. 13, presents a portrait of nine Iraqi women from all walks of life—from the most traditional (indeed, some are awash in mythic beliefs) to the most modern, calculating, and cynical; from those who feel anyone in power is an improvement over the brutality of Saddam Hussein to those who feel that President Bush brought only chaos to the region and ultimately betrayed the Iraqis.

The play is based on a series of interviews Raffo conducted with Iraqi women and inspired by an aphorism from a Muslim text: "God created sexual desire in 10 parts, then gave nine parts to women and one to men." Raffo, who inhabits each persona fully, moving from character to character seamlessly, says that whatever their differences, "all the women are united by their desire to live fully. I chose the title because it has a certain resonance. It points to the complexity of these women."

A highly animated, 34-year-old native of Okemos, Mich., Raffo, who punctuates her thoughts with a flurry of hand motions, meets with me in a Back Stage conference room, eager to talk about her worldview, politics, and the evolution of her show, which played in England last season and was selected as the best show in London by The Times and as one of the five best plays in London in December 2003 by The Independent.

"I would love audiences to find these women—many of whom may be alien—familiar in some way," notes Raffo. "I'd love to hear an American say, 'That Bedouin woman is just like my aunt.' But at the same time, I want American audiences to walk out a little confused, not able to say, 'Oh, I get it,' but rather [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 firepower."

Still, in an effort not to create characters who are too foreign to Westerners, Raffo admits presenting the most secular, educated women, "softening the religious aspects, although many Iraqis are Christian, not Muslim." Indeed, Raffo was raised a Roman Catholic. Her American-born mother and Iraqi-born father, who came here as a young man to work as a civil engineer, are both Christian.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Arab-American audiences have been the most responsive, Raffo reports: "They come to me at the end of the show with tears running down their faces. They recognize the women I'm portraying. One young man told me he lost eight members of his family because they didn't have a picture of Saddam Hussein on their wall. I had an Iraqi father and daughter come backstage with very different politics. The father kept saying, 'Bush is a miracle, Bush is a miracle.' The daughter didn't feel that at all, but they both loved the show. I don't know what Americans feel," Raffo continues. "They're less vocal, but I think they're enjoying it, with the exception of some middle-aged Republicans who saw it in Edinburgh, didn't get it, and were obviously turned off."

Pertinence in a Deep Way

Raffo wanted to act from the outset. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she majored in literature, before heading off to the University of San Diego, where she received her M.F.A. Short of a brief dry period, Raffo has worked steadily as an actor in commercials ("which pays the rent") and in theatre. Some of her recent acting credits include an Off-Broadway production of "Over the River and Through the Woods," along with "Macbeth" (as Lady Macbeth), "The Merry Wives of Windsor" (Mistress Page), and "The Rivals," all with the Acting Company. Under the auspices of the Old Globe Theatre, Raffo acted in "Othello" (directed by Jack O'Brien), "Romeo and Juliet" (directed by Daniel Sullivan), "As You Like It" (directed by Stephen Wadsworth), and "The Comedy of Errors" (directed by John Rando).

Raffo credits her acting experience in classical theatre as a significant—albeit unwitting— influence on her development as a writer: "It has allowed me to think mythically, poetically, and out of the box. There's nothing that prepared me more for writing than acting. Acting is about sympathizing and feeling with your whole body. And when I write, I'm in my bones, just like an actor."

She adds that her acting background helped her with interviewing Iraqi women -- that and being an Iraqi, "which got me in the door, and being an American, which, oddly enough, made it possible for the women to trust me. They felt they could say things to me, as an American, that they wouldn't allow themselves to say to another Iraqi."

Raffo insists that while she defines herself as an Iraqi-American (equally American and Iraqi), being a woman is what most shapes her.

"What's missing in the world is the feminine balance," Raffo suggests. "I'm not talking about female empowerment, but rather the combined energy of the male and female in everybody."

Raffo's most significant artistic influence is Ntozake Shange, a feminist playwright: "When I first read 'For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,' I felt I could write too. I felt it came from my blood. If I ever meet Ntozake, I'm going to hug her."

Raffo continues to view herself essentially as an actor, but writing has given her a chance to "integrate my voice in the process. I wish that were true for me as an actor, where only a part of me is used. Acting in my own one-person show is the best way to go for integrating all aspects of me. But, truthfully, I don't really care for solo shows, unless they really enhance the material."

Raffo is not entirely sure what she'll do next: "My real ambition is to appear in movies. I never really wanted to do theatre, although I believe the best training is in theatre. And before I did this piece, I dreamed about doing all the great classic roles. I no longer feel that need. In fact, I'm angry when I think about some of the classics. Why is everyone suddenly doing Greek plays to talk about Iraq? Why don't we go to the Iraqi artists when we talk about Iraq? Or unearth our own stories—new stories—that deal with Iraq?" She adds, "I'm not talking about topicality, but pertinence in a deep way."

Go to original article.



Review of "Nine Parts of Desire" in the New Yorker, Nov. 8, 2004

THE FURY AND THE JURY
by JOHN LAHR
Women, and men, make themselves heard.

The first Gulf War came to us via satellite and without words. The road to Basra—the totem of that military cakewalk—was a silent spectacle of incineration. Now, in the second Gulf adventure, Americans can hear the war, but the wall of silence around the female experience of carnage remains more or less intact. War and tyranny dehumanize the enemy; silence is part of that process. To inflict pain, physical or psychic, turns us away from the world; we stop thinking and feeling. In "9 Parts of Desire" (at the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre), Heather Raffo’s remarkable one-woman show, which bears witness to Iraqi women’s political oppression, an expatriate named Hooda explains that, in the case of Saddam's henchmen, "their way, I promise you—their way it's to torture the people close to you." She adds, "One woman I was with, they bring her baby, three months old baby, outside the cell, they put this woman’s baby in a bag with starving cats. They tape-record the sound of this and of her rape and they play it for her husband in his cell." She asks, "How could these people have liberated themselves?"

As Freud knew, when you can focus only on pain your thinking is wrecked. For more than a generation under Saddam, Iraqis lived in a state of permanent paranoia, which left them passive and mute. "Iraqis know they don’t open their mouth, not even for the dentist," the artist Layal, who was a collaborator, and who survived by painting nudes and doing portraits of Saddam, says. The very act of giving voice to feelings is a liberation to Amal, a fat Bedouin woman who tells of her hapless love life. "This is most free moment of my life. Really I mean this," she says, after admitting, "I have never talked this before. Nobody here knows this thing about me. I keep in my heart only."

"9 Parts of Desire," directed by Joanna Settle, is an example of how art can remake the world and eloquently name pain. Based on research and dozens of interviews conducted on four continents over eleven years (Raffo portrays nine women in the course of the evening), the play brings news of the psychic life of the brutalized and allows us to think about the unthinkable. Raffo, an American whose father is an expatriate Iraqi, exists in that liminal zone between two cultures—a culture that sees itself in charge of the narrative of history and one that has seen its history wiped out. In a thrilling moment, Raffo, speaking as the play’s only American character, chants the words "I love you" and then lists the names of the forty-five members of her own extended Iraqi family, beginning with Behnam, Rehbab, Ammar, Bashar, and continuing until all are pronounced into our world.

As a performer, Raffo is deft and vivacious; her writing, like her playing, is marked by wit and by a scrupulous attention to the details of character. Among the many felicities of the narrative is her ability to change not just character but tempo, which gives the play its particular thought-provoking wallop. The shifts—mystical to secular, old age to youth, Iraqi to American—keep an audience at attention and at arm’s length. For instance, in the middle of a rant against the war Raffo, as the American woman, stops to observe, "I should get out, get something to—eat—I'm fat. I should go to the gym and run. . . . Anyway, I can watch it at the gym. People work out to the war. On three channels."

The play, which manages to avoid the polemical, begins in prayer. The Mulaya—a professional mourner whose improvised verse about the dead is meant, according to the stage directions, "to bring the women to a crying frenzy"—enters, dropping old shoes into a stream. "Today the river must eat," she says. She goes on, "This river is the color of worn soles." Her lyrical invocation elevates the water to a metaphor not just of the lost promise of the Garden of Eden ("Where is anything they said there would be?") but of the emotional abdications of all women ("Underneath my country there is no paradise of martyrs only water, a great dark sea of desire, and I will feed it my worn sole"). Too often, a savage world has turned men into savages—brutes, betrayers, rapists—or into physical absences. A doctor whose husband lost his legs admits that she can't even look at him. "He's my death sentence," she says. Male mayhem haunts the narratives like the disappointment in the epigram—taken from the teachings of the seventh-century imam Ali ibn Abu Talib—that are the source of Raffo’s title: "God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one part to men."

Of the many atrocities that the women report, the most compelling is the spiritual mutation of Layal, whose collaboration with Saddam’s regime leaves her internally empty and morally bankrupt. She is beyond shame or pity. In her time, she has been shot by her husband for having an affair ("We never spoke about it"); a girlfriend, she tells us, was covered in honey and devoured by Dobermans in front of Saddam's son Uday, whom she had foolishly identified as her rapist. "Here my work is well known, hardly anyone will paint nudes," she says. "But this is us. Our bodies—isn't it deserted in a void, and we are looking for something always. I think it’s the light." Her way of dealing with self-loathing is to merge with the women she paints. "Always I paint them as me," she says. "I paint my body but herself inside me." Layal surrenders to her models; she also surrenders to her masters. "Always I run to them crying, begging, take care of me, they love me to run to them begging, so they can have me," she says of her perverse sadomasochistic game with the regime. "If I am not afraid, then there is no feeling." She adds, "I have been raped and raped and raped and raped, and I want more because they see me, they know me as I am, and that is freedom." If she is nihilistic about herself, she also voices a chilling poetic prophecy about America’s destiny. "You have our war inside of you like a burden, like an orphan," she says. "And we tether you to something so old you cannot see it. We have you chained to the desert, to your blood."



Review from nytheatre.com
Kelly McAllister · Oct. 4, 2004

Nine Parts of Desire is a solo play written and performed by Iraqi-American actress Heather Raffo. It's a portrait of the lives of a cross-section of Iraqi women, based on eleven years of research and interviews that Raffo conducted. The play premiered in the U.K. in 2003.

There is a beautiful, shattered mosaic currently on display downtown at the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre, and it’s called "Nine Parts of Desire." This one-woman show, written and performed by Heather Raffo, is essentially a series of monologues by various Iraqi women, telling the audience what life has been like for them in the past ten years or so, and giving us their perspectives on the current situation in Iraq, life under Saddam, and further, what is means to be an Iraqi woman. There is an elderly woman selling shoes she has collected from the ruins of various bombings and firefights; an intellectual exile living (and drinking a lot) in London; a survivor of a bunker-busting bomb; and probably the most complex character of the evening, an artist who has been twisted so much by life in war-torn Iraq that she comes off as a bit mad. At first, I was worried that the play would be one of those anti-war plays that are long on sentiment but low on artistry, but happily, such is not the case.

The play was written by Raffo over the last 11 years based on extensive research and interviews, according to the press materials. Raffo, an Iraqi-American from Michigan, even uses her own family experience for some of the play. In a touching scene, her relatives from Iraq call her in New York after 9/11 to make sure she is okay. One of them—a woman in Baghdad whose only English is the phrase “I love you”—repeats that phrase over and over, for several minutes, covering a multitude of emotions with an honesty that gives new meaning to the words shock and awe.

The monologues are, for the most part, delivered directly to the audience, as if we are surrogates for Raffo interviewing her subjects. This style leaves little room for the characters to grow or have a journey. The main exception to this is the woman who goes from defiant artist to shattered servant—and as such this is the most dramatically pleasing segment of Nine Parts of Desire. The play moves at a quick pace, and is never boring. It does seem to dwell a bit too long on what life was like under Saddam, and not enough on what life is like in Iraq now that he is gone— but this is a small complaint.

Under the direction of Joanna Settle, Raffo is one part chameleon, one part magician. It seems as if there is a cast of nine or more instead of just one woman. The action is quick, and the transitions from scene to scene and setting to setting are seamless.

Antje Ellerman's set is fantastic—suggestive of a beauty rudely interrupted by stray bombs. Layer upon layer of an ancient city crisscross the stage, separated by little rivers, fallen walls, and sandbags. It’s the perfect background for Raffo to perform on. Equally wonderful is the original music and sound design by Obadiah Eaves, which suggests the setting without ever being overpowering.