Wilma's Nine Parts of Desire

What’s it really like to be Iraqi since the U.S. invasion of 2003? The Iraqi-American playwright Heather Raffo endeavors to show us through a single multi-faceted actress (Jacqueline Antaramian), who purportedly embodies her land through portrayals of nine distinct women. These include a Bedouin, a doctor, a sexually liberated artist, a child, a bombing survivor and two exiles— one in London and one in New York. In the process they convincingly convey Iraqis’ devotion to their land (“Who’ll be left to inspire the people if all the intellectuals and artists run?” asks the artist), their finely-honed instincts for survival (“Iraqis know not to open their mouth, even for the dentist”), and their contempt for Saddam Hussein and the occupying Americans alike (“Americans are like a teenager— so passionate and strong, but they don’t think”).
You can’t help wishing George W. Bush and his White House armchair warriors had seen this play before rushing to liberate the place by force. But Bush would have a hard time sitting through Nine Parts of Desire— and so, for that matter, did I. Notwithstanding Antaramian’s considerable talent and energy, the one-person device undermines the notion of a diverse population: It’s difficult to keep track of which character she’s playing at any given moment, and the theatergoer hungering for nuance winds up concluding (like Bush, I suppose) that all Iraqis look and sound like Jacqueline Antaramian—precisely the opposite of the author’s presumed intention. And as with most one-person shows, Nine Parts is primarily an exercise in telling, not showing— full of expository dialogue and lacking much sense of characters evolving (as a result of events or by interaction with each other) in the course of the play, aside from rising anger expressed through harangues directed at the audience. The effect, after 90 minutes, is surely not as oppressive as the war in Iraq itself, but it may come close.— DAN ROTTENBERG