Nine Parts of Desire – Contact:

Tim Choy, Laura Shane, Peter Goldman

Davidson & Choy Publicity 323/954-7510 for the Geffen Playhouse

Photos are available by request – contact l.shane@dcpublicity.com

 

 

Geffen Playhouse

Heather RaffoŐs

NINE PARTS OF DESIRE

 

Raffo, Iraqi-American playwright and performer

captures the lives of nine Iraqi women

in this off-Broadway triumph

 

Limited Engagement at Brentwood Theatre

Six Weeks Only Sept 6 - Oct 16   Press Opening is Sept 14

 

LOS ANGELES, CA – JUNE 13, 2005 – Geffen Playhouse will begin its 10th anniversary season with the West Coast Premiere of Heather Raffo's riveting off-Broadway triumph NINE PARTS OF DESIRE.  The Geffen Playhouse production is written and performed by Heather Raffo and directed by Joanna Settle, the same team that created the New York Manhattan Ensemble Theater production that opened in October 2004 and was the triumph of the 2004-2005 season. The show ran for nine sold out months and was a pick of the New York Times for 24 weeks in a row.

 

NINE PARTS OF DESIRE begins previews at the Brentwood Theatre on September 6 and will run through October 16.  The official press opening is September 14.

 

The play is one of the few testaments to what it means to be a woman in Iraq.  Raffo first visited Iraq, her fatherŐs homeland, in 1974 when she was four years old.  It remained an enchanted memory – her grandmotherŐs house, family she was meeting for the first time, the warmth of the desert, the clear sky filled with stars.  As she grew up, uncles and aunts would occasionally visit, reinforcing her ties to Iraq.

 

Raffo returned as an adult in 1993 to visit her fatherŐs family just after the first Gulf War. ŇThey welcomed me like I was their daughter, I realized I was no longer just from Michigan.  The war had been such a deeply defining moment in my life –I couldnŐt sit in a bar with people cheering as bombs went off.  My body, blood, and psyche wanted my family to live.  What if I never see them again?  What if theyŐre in the wrong place at the wrong time?"

 

Raffo began her work on NINE PARTS OF DESIRE five years later as her thesis project while in Graduate School.  Having Ntozake ShangeŐs for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf as an influence, Raffo was determined to write about her connection to the women of Iraq with

 

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as much poetry and cultural rhythm.  "There was an inner seed in me that felt my soul was what connected me to Iraq.  It has a lot to do with my femininity.  When I started working on this play and meeting Iraqi women and really talking to them, I realized I had to share as much of myself with them as I was asking them to share with me.  I also realized how similar we all were."

 

However, the primary inspiration for the play happened in 1993 on a trip to the Baghdad art museum where she had seen a painting of a nude woman clinging to a barren tree.  Raffo says the painting had a big impact on her understanding of Iraqi women.  In a museum filled with mostly bill-board sized portraits of Saddam Hussein here was this female nude, seemingly embodying all the Iraqi women who saw her.  Raffo began to interview Iraqi artists, looking for as much information about the painting that she could find. 

 

Other characters for the play were born from this search including an aging expatriate intellectual who describes unspeakable tortures; a young girl who dances to ÔN Sync, knows the sound of an M-16 rifle, and hasnŐt been to school since the American occupation; a Bedouin woman who discovers her husbandŐs infidelity with her best friend; a grief-stricken mother who

has enshrined the bomb shelter where her family died; a doctor who can

barely cope and whose husband has lost his legs; an American, glued to CNN

for days, looking for information about her family – nine characters in all. And of course the lead character, an Iraqi artist who paints the female nude entwined with trees.

 

"Americans were hungry for this human face of Iraq."  During ten years of

interviews over four continents, she spoke to dozens of women including expatriates in London, who are characters in the play, and her own relatives.  And while the play is not a literal transcription of her interviews, it certainly aims to present a reality rarely shown to American and worldwide audiences.  "I liken it to song writing – I listen deeply to what each woman said, what she wanted to say but couldnŐt, and what she never knew how to say.  Then I wrote her song."

 

The title refers to a Muslim text, the 100 Maxims of Imam Ali, founder of the Shia sect and fourth leader of the Islamic World after Mohammed:  "God created sexual desire in 10 parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men."

 

NINE PARTS OF DESIRE was first performed in August 2003 at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.  It moved to the Bush Theatre in London's Off-West End where The Independent hailed it as one of the five best plays in London.

 

The show was also performed as a reading at The Public Theater as part of its New Work Now festival, followed by the Manhattan Ensemble Theater production in October 2004.  Following Los Angeles, NINE PARTS OF DESIRE will travel to Washington DC, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and Philadelphia.

 

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Charles Isherwood said in The New York Times, "A powerful collective portrait – an impassioned theatrical documentary.  Heather Raffo is the sole performer on the stage, but sheŐs far from lonely up there.  She inhabits her characters with such compelling vibrancy that they do not entirely dissapear when she moves from one to the nextÉThe voices of ordinary Iraqi citizens havenŐt made the leap from newspapers to the popular stage, and RaffoŐs play provides a welcome respite É   itŐs a reminder that the costs of tyranny and violent conflict are borne not by some amorphous, insentient collective population, but by individuals."

 

John Lahr in The New Yorker said, "An example of how art can remake the

world.  In this remarkable one-woman show, Heather RaffoŐs performance is

deft and vivacious; her writing, like her playing, is marked with wit and

by a scrupulous attention to the details of character."

 

Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal said Raffo "brings us closer to the inner life of Iraq than a thousand slick-surfaced TV reports É which may help to explain why it is an artist who has done what so few reporters have even thought to do, and done it with a persuasiveness that fewer still could hope to rival.   Yet her beautifully shaped one-woman play is a play, not a stodgily earnest piece of documentary theater, and therein lies its singular force and compulsion: it is persuasive precisely because it is beautiful.  See it soon.  See it tonight."

 

Heather Raffo, an American actress of Iraqi and American heritage, is the recipient of a 2005 Lucille Lortel Award for "Best Solo Show."  As a playwright, she has also been awarded a 2005 Blackburn Prize Special Commendation and the 2005 Marian Seldes-Garson Kanin Fellowship for NINE PARTS OF DESIRE Most recently she has received an Outer Critics Circle Nomination and a Drama League Nomination for "Outstanding Performance."

 

Raffo's recent acting credits include the role of Sarah Woodruff in the world premiere of The French Lieutenant's Woman at the Fulton Opera House, Over The River and Through the Woods Off-Broadway, and The Acting Company's productions of Macbeth (Lady Macbeth). The Merry Wives of Windsor (Mistress Page) and The Rivals.  She has appeared at The Old Globe Theatre in San Diego in Othello, directed by Jack O'Brien, As You Like It directed by Stephen Wadsworth, Macbeth directed by Nicholas Martin, and A Comedy of Errors, directed by John Rando.

 

Joanna Settle was recently in residency at the NY Public Theater to develop

Shakespeare's Coriolanus with her company, Division 13 (D13) Productions.

She adapted and directed Ionesco's final work Journeys Among the Dead at

HERE Arts Center and worked on the production of the Beckett shorts Act

Without Words I, Rockaby, Breath and That Time throughout Brooklyn's Old American Can Factory.  Settle directed Penthesilea by Von Kleist, Cascando

and Waiting for Godot by Beckett, and The Dumb Waiter by Pinter at Classic

Stage Company, The Trojan Women at Juilliard, and D13's workshop of The

 

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Genet Project, an original work based on the early life and writings of Jean Genet.  Settle is a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab and is currently a third year resident artist at HERE Arts Center. In 2000-2002, she received the NEA/TCG Career Development Grant for Directors.

 

Single ticket prices for NINE PARTS OF DESIRE range from $35-$64 and can be purchased through Ticketmaster at 213-365-3500,online at

www.ticketmaster.com, and all Ticketmaster outlets.  Tickets may also be purchased at the at the Brentwood Theatre Box Office (310-208–5454), between 10am and 6pm Monday through Friday, and 11am through 6pm Saturday and Sunday.

 

The Geffen Playhouse production of NINE PARTS OF DESIRE will be presented September 6 to October 16 (press opening September 14) at the Brentwood Theatre, which is located on the Veterans Administration grounds at 11301 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA. The performance schedule is as

follows: Tuesdays - Thursdays at 7:30 p.m.; Fridays at 8:00 p.m.; Saturdays at 4:00 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.; and Sundays at 2:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.

 

Geffen Playhouse is headed by Producing Director Gilbert Cates, Artistic

Director Randall Arney and Managing Director Stephen Eich.

 

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Calendar Listing for NINE PARTS OF DESIRE

 

Dates:           Tuesday, September 6 to Sunday, October 16

Press opening is September 14

 

Theatre:        Brentwood Theatre, on the Veterans Administration grounds,                                               11301 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA

 

Schedule:     Tuesday through Thursdays at 7:30 p.m.

Fridays at 8:00 p.m.

Saturdays at 4:00 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.

Sundays at 2:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.

 

Prices:          $35.00-$64.00

 

Tickets:         Phone:

á      Ticketmaster at 213-365-3500

á      Brentwood Theatre Box Office at 310-208–5454

 

In Person:

á      Brentwood Theatre Box Office, 11301 Wilshire Boulevard,

Los Angeles, CA -- Mon-Fri: 10am - 6pm, Sat-Sun: 11am - 6pm

á      All Ticketmaster Outlets -- including Tower Records, Robinsons-May, Wherehouse Music, Tu Musica, and Ritmo Latino.

 

Online:   www.ticketmaster.com