tsarina

HARD TRUTHS
Anna Ziegler

RUINED
By Lynn Nottage; directed by Kate Whoriskey. Presented by Manhattan
Theater Club, Lynne Meadow, Artistic Director; Barry Grove, Executive
Producer; Florie Seery, General Manager. At New York City Center Stage
I, 131 West 55th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues; (212) 581-1212.
Through September 6.

      Lynn Nottage’s revelatory play, Ruined, now running at the Manhattan Theatre Club, eases the audience slowly into a uniquely powerful theatrical experience. The play opens with a lengthy scene set in a shabby but gaily decorated bar somewhere in the Republic of the Congo. A light-hearted exchange between Mama Nadi, the proprietress of the establishment, and a warm traveling salesman for whom Mama Nadi’s bar is a regular pit-stop, sashays through inviting territory—flirtation, certainly, but also the comfortable rapport of people who, with time, have built a haven, one so safe they can assault each other (Christian, the salesman, to Mama Nadi: “You don’t have to say it. I know you want a husband.” Mama Nadi: “Like a hole in my head”). Accordingly, the audience feels safe here too—cozy even. Which is why, when the landscape suddenly shifts at the end of the first scene, there’s an almost audible intake of breath, a collective realization: this bar is not safe, these characters not who they seemed, and the setting that was so inviting surely a trap—the audience, like the characters, imprisoned here.

      As embodied by a truly remarkable ensemble cast, the stand-out being Condola Rashad, who effortlessly slips into the body—and the voice—of an unspeakably damaged woman, Ruined weaves a tapestry composed of the heartrending stories of the Congolese women who inhabit Mama Nadi’s. With language that’s poetic but also believably real, Nottage finds sorrow embedded in humor and vice versa. This is not a depressing play, at least not in the traditional sense, because one finds oneself laughing throughout, much in the way the women in the play must laugh at their situations or succumb to them.

      When Ruined rises to its earned crescendo, one longs to take these women and their grief and their resilience and their embattled hearts and unburden them. And yet this is the beauty and the power of Nottage’s play—in this land, the Congo (though it could be any poor and desperate nation) there is no survival without pain, just as the characters are themselves complicated, ignitable combinations of love, anguish, bitterness and hatred. Rendered memorably by the forceful Saidah Arrika Ekulona, Mama Nadi personifies these divisions; she is nurturer and hard-nosed businesswoman, savior and dictator, just as her bar is shelter and also a means of exploitation. But one doesn’t dislike Mama Nadi, nor does one pity her because she isn’t asking to be pitied.

      In this production, beautifully directed by Kate Whoriskey, Mama Nadi is as firm and immovable as the stolid trees that surround the bar. Getting to watch her cruelty and hardness give way ever so slightly is a gift. Brecht (on whose Mother Courage and Her Children Nottage's Ruined is loosely based) would scarcely recognize his work in this play that echoes much more with the timeless voices of human beings trapped in the most difficult of circumstances.

www.mtc-nyc.org
Through March 29, 2009