✭✭✭✭✩

by Lynn Nottage, directed by Philip Akin

Obsidian Theatre Company with Nightwood Theatre, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto

January 20-February 12, 2011

Ruined, Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winner for Drama in 2009, is a big, old-fashioned play with a contemporary setting and concerns.  It takes place during the continuing military insurgencies in the aftermath of the Second Congo War (1998-2003) in the mineral-rich Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of Congo.  As in Bosnia, mass rape has been used as a weapon of war to demoralize communities and women have become ostracized because they have been “ruined” through gang rape or rape with foreign objects, such as bayonets, that has destroyed the vaginal tract.

Tribal loyalties have become confused with land claims and political allegiances to create an atmosphere of chaos.  In this bleak setting Mama Nadi (Yanna McIntosh, in a magnificent performance) runs a bar and brothel to serve the need all men no matter what their political affiliation.  Like Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, she seeks to profit from the war by maintaining an apolitical stance.  Like Brecht, though less insistently, Nottage asks whether such a stance is really possible.  Mama Nadi’s supplier Christian (a very sympathetic Sterling Jarvis) persuades Mamma Nadi to take on two new girls--Selima (Sophia Walker), who has been raped and abandoned by her husband, and Sophie (Sabryn Rock), who is “ruined.”  Walker gives powerful performance and her account of her time as the slave of a militia is truly harrowing.  Rock shows us a woman so traumatized by her experience that at first she can barely speak.  Yet, under Mama Nadi’s grudging protection, she begins to blossom.  These may be the principal characters, but there is no weak link in the entire twelve-person cast.

Philip Akin’s direction is exemplary in its clarity of focus when such large groups are present on stage, but the pacing of the first act is slow and despite ever-present dangers the second generates little tension.  What comes off best are the small clashes, playful or not, between two people, as between Mama Nadi and Christian or between mama Nadi and either of the leaders (Anthony Palmer and André Sills) on opposing military sides.  After a second-last scene that is especially disturbing, Nottage chooses to end the play on a sentimental note that seems foreign to all that has preceded it--a comfortable conclusion to a play with distinctly uncomfortable subject matter.  What is indisputable is the power of Nottage’s portrayal of the will to survive in the midst of a conflict, too long ignored, that has waged war on women's bodies.         

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2011-01-21.

Photo: Sterling Jarvis and Yanna McIntosh. ©Chris Gallow.