Toronto Sun: ‘9 Parts’ a powerful production
20 May
FOUR STARS
Photo Credit: Michelle Bailey, Nerdy Girl Design
by John Coulbourn
When all else fails, we often take comfort in the maxim, “This too shall pass” — a maxim that conjures visions of lights burning, however timorously, at the end of the longest, darkest tunnels of despair.
But what if that light is merely the glow from an even worse conflagration than the one currently being endured — if the horror about to begin might make you think fondly of the horror you have just endured?
That’s the world of 9 Parts of Desire, a new play from Iraqi-American playwright Heather Raffo that opened Wednesday at the Theatre Centre, produced by Seventh Stage Theatre.
As its title implies, it is a play of nine parts — nine very individual women, connected only in shared desire for a better life, who endured the horrors of a brutal regime, only to see it replaced by a conqueror, unwilling or unable, to set the world to rights.
Under the direction of Kelly Straughan, 9 Parts begins on a highly theatrical note, as eight of the nine actors enter a simple, all-encompassing set designed by Robin Fisher and Lindsay R. Forde to evoke the excesses of war.
Meanwhile, the ninth — Maryem Hassan Tollar — carries us to Iraq on the wings of her own music and sets us down on the banks of the historic Tigris River, a river that once offered succor to the very beginnings of civilization.
In the past decades, however, it has born silent witness to mankind at his most uncivilized.
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