Lynn Nottage's "Ruined,' by PTC

During the height of the 1980s famine in Ethiopia, many academics embraced a radical solution first formulated by the Australian philosopher Peter Singer in response to similar suffering in Bengal in 1971. Singer argued that all Western nations should forego anything but subsistence-level spending and donate all excess funds to ending world hunger. (To read Singer's original essay, click here.)

By Singer's calculation, the $10 you'd spend on a movie doesn't yield as much "good" as the pain you could relieve by sending that money to help starving children in Africa. Many moralists, not to mention those endless "Please Give!" commercials, failed to mention the cause of Ethiopia's famine: scorched-earth policies employed by both sides during that country's civil war.

Any awareness of a famine's man-made causes weakens the moral imperative behind Singer's utility calculation, not only for Ethiopia and Bengal but also for refugee crises in places like Bosnia and Libya. Anyone eager to help is left to wonder, "What can I do?"

To its credit, Lynn Nottage's Ruined, now receiving a somewhat muted production by the Philadelphia Theatre Company, clearly identifies the source of the Congo's contemporary woes. The very setting of her play forms an oasis of bitter pleasures amid the continuing violent struggle between Congolese rebels led by Kisembe (as portrayed here by the actor U.R.) and the brutal government crackdown led by Commander Osembenga (Jamil Mangan).

Echoes of Casablanca

When the rebels advance, their ragtag ranks occupy the chairs and tables— not to mention the women's bodies— at Mama Nadi's bar. As government soldiers push forward, the uniforms change, but not the beer guzzling and whoring. To both sides, citizens are merely obstacles (or, at best, useful tools) on the road to the competing goals of liberation and order.

Mama, the bar's proprietor (Heather Alicia Simms), wants to play both sides of the conflict and, if possible, profit by rising above it. Like Humphrey Bogart's character Rick in Casablanca, she swears no allegiance, except to a wallet thickened by her regular customers— the gem merchant Harari (Paul Meshejian) and the bootlegger Christian (an excellent Oberon Adjepong). In Maria Mileaf's uneven production, this task doesn't seem much of a chore. The mere presence of drunken soldiers with itchy trigger fingers should convey lingering terror, but only Mangan delivers that sense consistently.

Mileaf's staging does convey the suffering of women reduced to serving as submissive sexual outlets for the men who, beyond the walls of Mama's bar, would otherwise take them by force. Salima (Erika Rose) bears the child of gang rape by a platoon of rebels; Sophie (Keona Welch) feels the ravages of the play's title in her painful, ambled gait— some soldier's savagery destroyed her reproductive organs. Each delivers raw, unflinching portrayals of hurt and anger coupled with a pitiable desire to return to the families and lives they've lost.

Waiting for Leonardo

In its plot and themes, Ruined resembles a number of other works. Antje Ellermannn's lantern-lit set, with its corrugated-tin roofs, recalled the rum-soaked hangover taste of all the Caribbean bars I've passed out in, not to mention the mercantile atmosphere that prevailed amongst war refugees in Casablanca, or the war-ravaged countryside of the film Blood Diamond, which was set in the Sierra Leone civil war of 1996-99. (I kept wondering when Leonardo DiCaprio would burst through the door blazing a pair of .45s.) Ellermann provides a great touch in the Rihanna poster— a symbol of liberated Western sexuality— that the prostitute Josephine displays as a shrine in her bedroom.

Nottage built her profiteering heroine Mama on the same paradigm employed by Brecht in Mother Courage and Her Children; from Heather Alicia Simms's strong performance, I could easily imagine her playing or shifting between both roles in repertory.

Fairy-tale ending

But these other works differ sharply from Nottage's play in one central respect: each inspires or sets forth a plan of action. Casablanca, released just after America entered World War II, fostered American support for the Allied war effort in Europe. Blood Diamond called for U.N. sanctioning and boycotts against the commerce that caused barbarity. Brecht hoped to instill a perpetual peace by forever wrecking heroic illusions about war.

Nottage's play not only declines to offer a solution, it also wraps itself up in a tidy fairy-tale ending that would embarrass even the Brothers Grimm. Her parting message— "People can find happiness and love even amidst the most unbearable atrocity"— is the sort of bland benediction that effectively turns the audience into mere tourists in a Disneyland of horrors.

I left the theater as I walked in, wondering: When a humanitarian crisis occurs, just what am I supposed to do?