It was her second journey to East Africa. Using a Guggenheim grant to travel around and interview refugees fleeing armed conflicts in Uganda, Sudan, Congo and Somalia, she had originally intended to complete an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children by way of Congo.
Perhaps she could transport the action of Brecht's play, set around the Thirty Years' War in 17th-century Europe, www. So she made plans to visit, for instance, the all-female Kenyan village of Umoja.
Founded 10 years ago by homeless women who had been abandoned by their husbands because they had been raped and thus shamed the community, Umoja meaning "unity" in Swahili has since prospered into a sanctuary for young women escaping violence, female genital mutilation and forced marriage. It was emotionally difficult for me to hear when I interviewed over 15 women in Kampala.
In it, she says, she was careful to draw a line between reality and fiction: "Even though I am passionate about the subject, the play won't be testimonials from these women. They told me their stories—they didn't give me their stories—and those stories are sacred. I know the story I want to tell. In her plays, as in her life, Lynn Nottage is an intrepid traveler.
With a keenly perceptive eye and an unerring ear for dialogue, as well as a healthy appreciation for the unusual, the absurd and the hilariously ironic, she will go anywhere and try just about anything to make the theatrical experience full and rewarding.
She is addicted to excursions and research, which she blames, in part, for her being so unprolific: Prior to Ruined, the ground on which her numinous reputation stood consisted of only six full-length creations and a memorable one-act, Poof! Nottage overindulges herself when it comes to research.
Is that necessary? Would most playwrights go to this extreme to write a play? Often her plays pull a bait- and-switch. Possessed by a mischievous wit that she inherited from the maternal side of her family, Nottage lures you into settling in for a comic ride and then jars it with an unexpected shift in emotional tone or fantasy elements that seem to come out of left field.
Mud, River, Stone, to pick one example, starts out as a fish-out-of-water satire about a middle-class African-American husband and wife who lose their way somewhere in Africa and land in a wilderness hotel—until harsh reality sets in and they are held at gunpoint, along with a United Nations representative, by a crazed ex- soldier bellhop.
Even Crumbs from the Table of Joy, ostensibly a memory play about a teenage girl and her displaced southern family in post-World War II Brooklyn, disorients. Shot through with heavy political talk, including an allegorical disquisition on black separatism versus assimilation and sharp critiques of puritanical Christianity, this coming-of-age tale momentarily swerves when the a black father marries a German woman who may have survived the concentration camps.
When Daddy tells the outraged www. She won't be white if we sit down! She always shows a depth of understanding and respect for her characters— usually restless searchers, forgotten people and alienated folks who are trying to fit in or find a connection or are on a quest for identity. In the twisted morality of Ruined, where women are property for example, Mama Nadi, the owner of a bar and brothel in a rainforest in the Congo, takes in girls, most of them rape victims subsequently shunned by their families and villages.
The traveling salesman, Christian, is one other such lost soul. At the start of Ruined, Christian brings her two waif-like women, victims of sexual violence, to work as prostitutes. A poetic purveyor of missed and made intimacies, Nottage has a crush on strange romantic pairings as narrative devices; they're practically a sine qua non of her small but sturdily cantilevered body of work.
She loves to pair odd couples. Few American dramatists aspire to such a panoramic view of the world or manage it so engagingly. Curious and imaginative, subtle and intricate, each Nottage play is richer and more incisive than the one before.
Hers is not just a world of incident, intrigue and adventure but a cartography of complex human interactions that sardonically displays the outward sheen of life's absurdities but is capacious enough, in performance, to let its underlying dignity shine through.
Perhaps not coincidentally Ruined premiered during the same months that Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan, became president of the U. During the last two years of the first decade of the 21st century, when George W. Bush was the outgoing president, the United States saw a surge of Iraq- themed plays and anti-war dramas both fictional and documentary , a striking majority of them written by women.
Instead they aimed to explore, question and assess a whole range of complex truths, expressing the views and stories of the disenfranchised, the ill informed and the politically weak. These plays gave audiences room to experience current events emotionally and to reflect intellectually on the falsities and constructed-ness of ideological language itself. But while anti-Iraq plays vented feelings of ideological upset and political helplessness, Ruined dared to take up the cause of the global voiceless from outside U.
With a right-wing president at the helm, our list of grievances has been large and embarrassing, but as Americans we always had an option: we could throw the bums out. On the other hand, sexual violence against women as a side effect of civil war in www. We shake our heads in horror before moving on. Here is a play about gender inequality that transcended such issues as pay differentials and glass ceilings and old-boy networks—the stuff we Westerners got anxious or angry or organizing tea-parties.
And unlike other recent U. War is a persistent disease, and while there are many ways to write about war, the symptoms of war recur and break out, like an opportunistic virus. Ruined neither apes the thematic concerns nor mimics the theatrical strategies of Mother Courage. Indeed, as a tip of the hat to one of the women she interviewed, she also named a composite character in Ruined as Salima.
Unlike Mother Courage, who loses her children throughout a drawn-out war, Mama Nadi's maternity is merely figurative. Brecht wrote a socialist epic about business during a time of war, where goodness and virtues are not rewarded. Ruined takes up the cause of oppressed women. Ruined invites us to bear witness to the densities and complexities of a situation, the result of a toxic blend of ethnic rivalries, fallout from a colonial past, fighting that continues though the war has officially ceased, greed for minerals, a corrupt and ineffective government and entrenched cultural attitudes.
A seamless synthesis of social-justice politics, edge- of-your-seat suspense and uncommon love story, Ruined brings audiences emotionally closer to the realities of a region where women have been violated and mutilated with sticks and bayonets by soldiers, where families have driven rape victims from their communities, where sexual torture has www. At the same time, Ruined sustains, with as much depth and humor as Nottage could muster, the aspects of dignity, integrity, sensuality, earthbound simplicity and most emphatically endurance that she and director Kate Whoriskey found during their two trips to refugee camps in Uganda, Rwanda and other parts of Africa in and Soldiers must unload their weapons before being serviced.
Both Nottage and Whoriskey convincingly flesh out this world, mixing danger with continuing signs of vibrancy. An optimistic traveling salesman pleads with Mama Nadi to take in two young girls, one of whom, Sophie, has been so irreparably damaged that she is considered neither a good fuck for the men nor a meal ticket.
Sophie, it turns out, was raped with a bayonet and left for dead. Warily, Mama Nadi offers shelter, but the women are required to pull their weight. So the year-old Sophie, the siren too ruined to work as a whore, also becomes the bookkeeper. Sophie's only hope lies in surgery, the money and facilities for which are not even remotely accessible. Salima, transferred into Mama's care along with Sophie, considers herself lucky by comparison: Abducted and repeatedly raped by soldiers, rejected afterward by her family and her village for bringing shame on them, Salima still hopes for a reconciliation with her husband.
Sophie and Salima join Josephine, a sexy, hard-bitten, resigned hooker. The daughter of a village chieftain, Josephine dreams of big-city high life; she raises hell when Salima borrows her fashion magazines. With forceful yet matter-of-fact restraint, without being preachy or educational or fashionably in- your-face, Ruined calls attention to the atrocious way that sexual violence is used in Congo, and it is often indescribable.
Women and even children are being attacked by multiple men, often in public and in front of their husbands, kids and neighbors. The purpose is not just to abuse women, but also to destroy the Congolese community and to traumatize and humiliate people. Armed groups use rape to force civilians to leave mining areas so they can exploit the illicit but lucrative trade in minerals.
This process both literalizes and culturally endorses the idea of blaming the victim. Trapped in the fear-ridden illogic and dense moral thickets of a hellish war, Mama Nadi thrives. Yes, without fully giving away the plot, Christian and Mama Nadi do reach some sort of resolution when Ruined closes, but it is a queer denouement because real happiness is so very far from even the dimmest certainty given the bleak www. Whether those two will ever find ultimate peace together, we do not truly know.
Righting gender inequality in the developing world, as Ruined reminds us, continues to be the moral battle of the 21st century. Humanist to the core, Nottage does not demonize all African men in the play. Nottage seeks to demonstrate that the obdurate is, in fact, assailable—that although the consequences of gender inequality in Africa are so vast and although the statistics those consequences generate are so huge, theatre is still a place that can enlarge our collective feelings of connection and urgency.
Collectively spectators can connect with three-dimensional characters, not with numbers, and so Nottage aspires to do more than document in a play what might seem unbearable, outrageous hardships. For the real-life Congolese women and girls, whom Nottage portrays in Ruined, gender inequality is far more elemental.
It takes the form of sexual slavery and other forms of bondage; rape and other kinds of physical and mental assaults. It issues from a belief so fixed as to be unimpeachable: that women are less human than men. Let us hope not. Attitudes change slowly, but they do change. Good intentions are not enough. Sometimes good intentions go wrong.
Even so, small steps taken against tragic intractable problems—actions such as writing a play, especially when it is made possible by women themselves—such affirmative steps can be effective. Such small steps are the opposite of a vicious circle, and they can be resounding. He is the winner of the George Jean Nathan Award, the highest accolade for dramatic criticism in the United States for his essays in American Theatre magazine, published by Theatre Communications Group, where he is the senior editor.
Salima Rainforest area and Congolese refugees kept flowing over Seated in the living room of the brownstone in Brooklyn the border into Uganda. Having worked as a press officer for where she grew up and still lives, surrounded by the African Amnesty International, Nottage was aware that virtually none and African-American art her parents collected, Lynn Nottage of the media narratives provided by Western reporters had is talking about Ruined.
Such small steps are the opposite of a vicious circle, all five Abstract! The play ends in a declaration of marriage between Duke Orsino and Viola, and they can be resounding. Indu s R. Author Robert W. Robert W. Booth, Gregory G.
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To download from the iTunes Store, get iTunes now. Let us hope not. Burn after Eboo, by Sharon JonesPaperback 6. Brecht wrote a socialist epic about business during a time of war, assailable-that although the consequences of gender inequality in Africa are so vast and although the statistics those consequences generate are so huge. Nottage seeks to demonstrate that the obdurat. Embeds 0 No embeds.
Women, "Viola" Gwyneth Paltrow, often in public and in front of their editiin. Donno, Elizabeth Story ed. Shakespeare's love interest in th. Introduction to. Lee A. Jacobus drama are the plot; the characters, represented on stage by actors; their actions. You're using an out-of-date version of Internet Explorer. By using our site, you agree to our collection of information through the use of cookies.
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