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By Carol Davis
 SAN DIEGO-“God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men”: Ali ibn Abu Taleb.
Both Geraldine Brooks and Heather Raffo wrote pieces entitled 9 Parts of Desire. Brooks also penned the epic story People of the Book about the Sarajevo Haggadah. Her Nine Parts of Desire: The hidden World of Islamic Women in 1995 took her on a journey as a journalist behind the scenes in Saudi Arabia and Iran. It is a non-fiction book based on her experiences and interviews with Muslim women. Overall it deals with the oppression of women in the Middle East.
Geraldine Brooks wasn’t born Jewish but by age 14 was obsessed by the Jewish people and their religion. In her teens she wrote a play about the Warsaw Ghetto. In a 2008 interview she said that she got Jewish ‘bug’ from her father who became a ‘passionate lefty Zionist’ by choice.
Heather Raffo is an Iraqi American playwright and actress. Her one-woman play 9 Parts of Desire was inspired by the women of her father’s birthplace and a trip to the Saddam Art Centre in Baghdad after she journeyed back to Iraq in 1993 a few years after the Gulf War ended. Her father’s relatives still live there. The images she heard and saw are told through her eyes in Parts.
They represent a cross section of ordinary and ‘extraordinary’ Iraqi women: a painter, a radical communist, a doctor, an exile, wives and lovers. They are all connected to Iraq in one way or another, have all been affected by its political activities over the past50years and are related by their humanity and war.
Raffo, a University of San Diego alumna/ The Old Globe M.F.A. is having her play mounted by Mo’lolelo Performance Arts Company at the 10th Avenue Theatre at 930 10th Ave. through Nov. 1. Janet Hayatshahi directs the three women who represent the nine characters all different ages, in Raffo’s play; Lisel Gorell-Gets, (Layal, Doctor, Umm Ghada), Frances Anita Rivers (Amal, American, Nanna) and Dré Slaman (Mullaya, Huda and Iraqi girl).
Seamlessly, with the handoff of the black abaya, a black flowing cape that half hides their faces, (Charlotte Devaux designed the costumes) the women tell their tales of love, hate, divorce, sex and abuse, the horrors of war, bombs and captivity, art, freedom of expression and freedom from male dominance and their views on the Western culture as opposed to Western thinking, the idea that freedom is not as desirable as peace.
The play opens on David F. Weiner’s busy set with shoes lining the Tigris River banks, which we learn belong to the many lost souls from wars. There are all sizes and shapes of bowls, jars and ceramic dishes in the forefront with drop cloths, ladders, an assortment of picture frames and a field hospital set off by a Middle Eastern shapes of lattice work in the background.
Here we meet Mullaya who welcomes us into her world. She is
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a professional mourner. There is a call to prayer (Paul Peterson) and Mullaya talks about the shoes along the river asshe mourns for the dead. “This was the Garden of Eden”, she says. “Things have changed.”
Then Layal, the beautiful and complex painter tells us her reasons she won’t leave Iraq. She could go to London where her sister lives but if she and the other artists leave who will be left to inspire the others? But Layal was the inspiration for Raffo and as such her story is the most riveting as she tells us about her favored status in Saddam’s regime painting nudes, being raped and brutalized; her failure as a mother.
Gorell-Gets has one of the most challenging roles of painter, doctor and Umm Ghada a peasant woman who gives tours of the Amiriya bomb shelter where her entire family, including her nine children were incinerated by an experimental bomb. “The shelter became an oven. A woman vaporized. In the whole day later the only body I did recognize is my daughter Ghada, so I take her name”. “Ghada means tomorrow. And now Umm Ghada is Mother of Tomorrow”.
The stories weave a picture of the cross section of women; the Bedouin Iraqi, Amal, (Frances Anita Rivera) who was married to an Israeli but because of the political climate in the two countries the marriage ended, she longs for love and carries on a long distance phone relationship with another man in Dubai; the doctor who treats the children who were born with serious birth defects because of the wars and the carcinogens in the air; an American Iraqi who marches in demonstrations supporting the downfall of Saddam and the Iraqi (Dré Slaman) girl who loves ‘N Sync as she watches Oprah on satellite. She can tell the difference between a bomb and a grenade. She and her friends collect bullets and guns, and the stories keep flowing like the Tigris.
All nine women learned to survive in spite of all they endured which is a testament to their spirit, optimism and resilience. Some of the stories resonated, others in this reviewer's mind bounce but never land. Each of the three women is a gifted actor in her own right, but yours truly would have liked to have seen this piece as a one-woman show.
While some of the stories got lost in translation either by just falling off the radar in the very high ceiling theatre or by the effect of using three story tellers rather than one, I can’t say but by the time you read this everything should be settled into a smooth transition and all the glitches ironed out.
Jason Bieber’s lighting design helped focus and Charlotte Devaux’s costumes, while simple, identify the characters and Paul Peterson’s sound design, underscore the conditions under which these women lived.
Mo’olelo in Hawaiian means story/ legend/tale/narrative.
For something different, it’s worth a try.
See you at the theatre.
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