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Congo war's atrocities hit home with Ruined
THEATER REVIEW | Profiles in courage emerge in brutal tale
Taken from the November 18, 2008 issue of the Chicago Sun-Times
By Hedy Weiss
If you wish to be among the first to see the play that in every way, shape and form deserves to become the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner for drama, head directly to the Goodman's Owen Theatre, where Lynn Nottage's Ruined is now in its explosive world premiere.
A brash, searing, heart-of-darkness story—periodically shot through with moments of fearsome comedy and the redemptive spirit that suggests the sheer persistence of the life force—Ruined, with its volcanic direction by Kate Whoriskey, is a 21st century African variation on Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, that quintessential tale of the savage nature of life during a war that seems to have no end.
Like Mother Courage, Nottage's play is no documentary. Yet it takes full account of the hideous strife that has wracked the (so-called) Democratic Republic of Congo since the 1990s—involving as many as seven foreign armies and countless militias, resulting in the death of more than 5 million people and, perhaps most insidiously, sparking a wholly pathological assault on women. In its telling of a profoundly human story involving a great cross-section of characters and motivations, Ruined captures the warping effects that this hellish situation has engendered, from the almost total corruption and brutalization of a society to a business-as-usual quality of survivalism in which small acts of kindness and beauty offer glints of hope.
The Mother Courage at the center of Ruined is Mama Nadi (the formidable Saidah Arrika Ekulon), the brash, profit-driven proprietor of a bar and brothel in a small mining town in eastern Congo. Though a fairly remote outpost—where the Congo's extraordinary reserves of tin, copper, gold and diamonds are exploited—it is becoming a hotbed as "government" and "rebel" militias move their front lines ever closer.
It is to this relatively "safe haven" that Mama's supplier, the antically romantic Christian (Russell G. Jones in a sublime performance of bristling wit and energy), brings two victims of the war. One is the farm girl Salima (Quincy Tyler Bernstine, whose show-stopping recounting of her gang rape and subsequent rejection by her family is beyond description). The other is Christian's niece Sophie (the princesslike Condola Phyleia Rashad), a proud, educated young woman whose extreme sexual desecration has left her "ruined."
On Derek McLane's vivid set, a relatively small cast magically conjures hundreds, with Cherise Boothe as Josephine, the smashing veteran prostitute who can dance up a storm (movement by Randy Duncan); Tom Mardirosian as the canny outsider businessman living on the edge; Chris Chalk and Kevin Mambo as half-mad, macho rival militia leaders, and Chike Johnson and William Jackson Harper as lost soldiers. Simon Shabantu Kashama and Ali Amin Carter supply the irresistible music.
"Congo" means "hunter," a grimly fitting name for a country in which war has become a maniacal chase after power, money and revenge—an increasingly hallucinatory, blood-drenched pursuit, and a meaningless act of self-slaughter.
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