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The set is like a scene from a Dali painting. A tree, ladders, picture frames, and shoes line  the table where bowls filled with water represent a river. A woman walks to the front of the stage, fully clothed in her black abaya, and tells us, the audience, about a lifeline, a river that is colored by distance and by shoes thrown into it. The river, like the shoes, have become the color of souls torn and worn. The imagery and metaphor of a river having been beaten and travelled across by shoes piques when the woman mentions that there are holes in these shoes—that there are holes even in this story. A story, like a sea of desire, yearning to be told.
So opens Heather Raffo’s “9 Parts of Desire”, the story of nine Iraqi women who have survived their own fates with a brutal dictatorship and have had to face the unparalleled costs of war.
They become chorus-like, intertwined in moments of pure emotion bent on getting across their tremendous  From the moment the play begins, the voices of the three actors, who take turns playing these at times courageous and even outrageous women, blend themselves together in a refrain. struggles.
Playwright Raffo, a Catholic Iraqi-American, spent time visiting family in Iraq in 1993. She began interviewing real women and imagining others while still a student at the University of California, San Diego/Old Globe MFA program.
Initially a one-woman play in which Raffo plays all the roles herself, the performance debuted in Edinburgh in 2003 and was later performed in London and New York, where Raffo received a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize Special Commendation and a Lucille Lortel Award for Best Solo Show. At Mo’olelo Performing Arts, Janet Hayatashi, the director of this riveting production, cast three women to play the nine roles that Raffo originally casted for herself.
Among the more memorable monologues is Amal, played by Frances Anita Rivera, a full-bodied Bedouin woman who longs for a third husband. She has two children, but left her first and second husband due to an affair with the former and politics with the latter. Amal’s presence exudes vitality, bursting from the seams of her abaya, a desire for freedom and peace. Because of her robust size, love is slow on forthcoming. Her laughter streams in-between tears of her heavily accented tongue, and the audience is bewitched by her charm and spirit.
What was even more riveting than the characters slowly unraveling themselves before the audience that night at the 10th Ave Theatre was the mixture of loss ladled with desire. Although the juxtaposition of characters and stories were engrossing, they were also slightly inhibiting. At certain jarring moments, the actors would go in and out of character with such ease it would leave audience members grasping to keep up with the their duress.
An Iraqi child stuck inside the house without much to do except watch ‘N Sync videos and mimic their movements, actor Dre Slaman aptly portrays this rambunctious child who accidentally implicates her father in an essay she wrote for class. In a following scene, Layal, played by Lisel Gorell-Getz, a famous nudist artist, relays to the audience that she paints her own body over her creations, and in actuality, it is but one body. What separates herself from them is that she is always trying to reveal something. Layal is a contradictory figure in this production: both trying to appear as if she didn’t rely on her looks and image and having to do so, she ultimately pays for her selfish reasoning
In a jarring moment towards the end of the play, the line ‘I love you’ gets repeated like a mantra. The voice-over replays itself, over and over, until audience members can’t stand it anymore. It stops, and we realize that the implications were all different, that ‘I love you’ was supposed to save some, while it was supposed to suppress hurt and outrage in others.
The voices that night ended up surprising and moving viewers. What more, it was the vision of these women that ended up surpassing every one of our expectations. Both uncanny and jarring at the same time, “9 Parts of Desire”, shows that a work of art wrested from the Saddam Hussein’s regime and America’s auspicious responses to it, could last.
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