by ABBY COLODNER
12th grade Hunter H.S.
Heather Raffo plays ten Iraqi women from all walks of life
in her one-woman show, Nine Parts of Desire. She bases her play on her interviews
over the past decade with Iraqi women living in Baghdad and abroad, whose lives
have been shaped by Iraq’s turbulent past and the violence of the current war.
Raffo, who herself is Iraqi American, plays all these characters, speaking intimately
and directly to the audience, revealing their common experiences of fear and
love and their different takes on what the future holds for them in Iraq. The
show is both tragic and entertaining, worth seeing both for Raffo’s impressive
performance and the compelling stories her characters tell. 
One of the strengths of the show is the touching, desperate, sometimes disturbing experiences her characters share with the audience. An old woman who sells artifacts in a market shows the audience a bomb shelter where two American bombs left everyone in the shelter dead. She shines a flashlight into the darkness of the theatre, pointing out the silhouette of a woman burnt into the wall when she was vaporized by the bomb. A British doctor working in a decrepit hospital in Baghdad speaks about the effects of radiation on the people of Baghdad—she has just delivered a two-headed baby. A painter planning a mosaic for the floor of an international hotel in Baghdad decides to make it of George W. Bush’s face, so that everyone who enters the hotel will walk on his face. There are also many moments in the women’s stories that are poignantly familiar: a woman decides she cannot find love because she is fat; a young girl dances along to NSync on television until the electricity fails.
Every fiber of Raffo’s body seems to change in the couple of seconds she has to readjust her burqa between characters. As the painter, she is as quick-moving and regal as a dancer. A moment later, as the market woman, she moves with an unselfconscious clunkiness, like a wagon with one bent wheel, perpetually bent forwards from the waist in a pleading posture. Suddenly she throws open her burqa, which becomes an airy cape hung from her wrists, accentuating the charming gestures of the bohemian painter. Her face seems to change— the market woman’s is harsh and a little wild; the painter’s is animated and beautiful. "She Bases her play on her interviews over the past decade with Iraqi women living in Baghdad and abroad, whose lives have been shaped by Iraq’s turbulent past and the violence of the current war"
The tiny theatre is well suited to a solo show. The fact that the words of the play are based on actual interviews is evident in the way Raffo’s characters address the audience. They appear to be speaking to one person— an interviewer sitting across from them—although they are speaking out to the audience. Though Raffo easily establishes a connection with the audience, at times her accents and use of broken grammar make it difficult to follow a train of thought. The women tend to speak conversationally, as though the audience might respond. One character asks timidly, “Maybe freedom is better than peace?” and the question hangs in the silent air.
Though it builds in emotional intensity, Raffo’s show lacks the arc that would tie all her characters together in the end. The character who bookends the show, appearing at the very beginning and again at the end is less an actual character than a representation of all the other women, integrating bits of all the characters into one speech. This seems to be Raffo’s attempt to sum up all of the characters into one representation, but after the weighty, realistic stories, the symbolic character feels unconvincing. Her show has little structure other than going from one character to another, sometimes revisiting certain characters, and it’s hard to find a continuous thread that can help guide you through the show.
“One character asks timidly, ‘Maybe freedom is better than peace?’ and the question hangs in the silent air.”
At the end of Nine Parts of Desire you don’t leave with a prescription for political action, but you leave reminded of the urgency of these women’s situations. In one particularly effective moment, an American woman in New York— who spends her days watching the bombing of Baghdad on television, always searching for her Iraqi family’s houses on the screen—is on the phone with her relative in Iraq, who speaks no English except to say “I love you.” “‘I love you’ ‘I love you’ ‘I love you’ ‘I love you’ ‘I love you,’” the two women say to each other over and over, desperately. It is the only thing to be said, and the moment is acutely moving.