Who is ruined in the play ruined

African music has a unique and diverse sound, rich with infl uences from musical styles ranging from American jazz to tribal sounds of traditional African music.

This is always a let-down. The greatness of the musical tradition in Africa really comes from the incredible diversity. We have tried to use the research to give a foundation for the performers to explore. With just two people, Meicht and his musicians are able to create a surprisingly varied sound. One musician plays the electric guitar, and the other performs on a makeshift percussion set, designed in collaboration with Meicht and the percussionist.

The percussion setup for this production includes a Makuta drum, a traditional instrument from Central Africa; a bass drum made from a rubber trash can; various cymbals; and a few shakers. Soji Odukogbe, the guitarist for this production, is originally from Nigeria and has expertise in different styles of African guitar.

Even Crumbs from the Table of Joy , ostensibly a memory play about a teenage girl and her displaced southern family in post-World War II Brooklyn, disorients. Shot through with heavy political talk, including an allegorical disquisition on black separatism versus assimilation and sharp critiques of puritanical Christianity, this coming-of-age tale momentarily swerves when the a black father marries a German woman who may have survived the concentration camps.

Though at heart a withering satirist, Nottage always goes beyond the external to get to the heart and soul of a place or an era. She always shows a depth of understanding and respect for her characters—usually restless searchers, forgotten people and alienated folks who are trying to fit in or find a connection or are on a quest for identity. In the twisted morality of Ruined , where women are property for example, Mama Nadi, the owner of a bar and brothel in a rainforest in the Congo, takes in girls, most of them rape victims subsequently shunned by their families and villages.

The traveling salesman, Christian, is one other such lost soul. At the start of Ruined , Christian brings her two waif-like women, victims of sexual violence, to work as prostitutes. She loves to pair odd couples. Few American dramatists aspire to such a panoramic view of the world or manage it so engagingly.

Curious and imaginative, subtle and intricate, each Nottage play is richer and more incisive than the one before. What were other U.

Perhaps not coincidentally Ruined premiered during the same months that Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan, became president of the U. During the last two years of the first decade of the 21st century, when George W.

Bush was the outgoing president, the United States saw a surge of Iraq-themed plays and anti-war dramas both fictional and documentary , a striking majority of them written by women.

Instead they aimed to explore, question and assess a whole range of complex truths, expressing the views and stories of the disenfranchised, the ill informed and the politically weak. These plays gave audiences room to experience current events emotionally and to reflect intellectually on the falsities and constructed-ness of ideological language itself.

But while anti-Iraq plays vented feelings of ideological upset and political helplessness, Ruined dared to take up the cause of the global voiceless from outside U. With a right-wing president at the helm, our list of grievances has been large and embarrassing, but as Americans we always had an option: we could throw the bums out.

On the other hand, sexual violence against women as a side effect of civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo is the kind of subject most of us read about in a Nicholas Krystof column in the New York Times or watch on a CNN report. We shake our heads in horror before moving on. Here is a play about gender inequality that transcended such issues as pay differentials and glass ceilings and old-boy networks—the stuff we Westerners got anxious or angry or organizing tea-parties.

And unlike other recent U. War is a persistent disease, and while there are many ways to write about war, the symptoms of war recur and break out, like an opportunistic virus. Ruined neither apes the thematic concerns nor mimics the theatrical strategies of Mother Courage. Indeed, as a tip of the hat to one of the women she interviewed, she also named a composite character in Ruined as Salima.

Brecht wrote a socialist epic about business during a time of war, where goodness and virtues are not rewarded. Ruined takes up the cause of oppressed women. Ruined invites us to bear witness to the densities and complexities of a situation, the result of a toxic blend of ethnic rivalries, fallout from a colonial past, fighting that continues though the war has officially ceased, greed for minerals, a corrupt and ineffective government and entrenched cultural attitudes.

To expose this conspiracy, Nottage moves as far from Brechtian strategies as possible—she strives not to distance us from its subject, sexual violence. A seamless synthesis of social-justice politics, edge-of-your-seat suspense and uncommon love story, Ruined brings audiences emotionally closer to the realities of a region where women have been violated and mutilated with sticks and bayonets by soldiers, where families have driven rape victims from their communities, where sexual torture has resulted in sterility or infection or death.

At the same time, Ruined sustains, with as much depth and humor as Nottage could muster, the aspects of dignity, integrity, sensuality, earthbound simplicity and most emphatically endurance that she and director Kate Whoriskey found during their two trips to refugee camps in Uganda, Rwanda and other parts of Africa in and Gain full access to show guides, character breakdowns, auditions, monologues and more!

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