There’s no arguing that the stories of Iraqi women in 9 Parts of Desire aren’t edifying: an expatriate describing Baathist tortures, a widow who survived the U.S. bombing of a bunker filled with civilians, a girl dancing to an *NSYNC video when the electricity goes out, and the occasional woman in love. But the play makes better documentary than drama. The set (by Antje Ellermann, who also designed the New York production) is the strongest part of the production, re-creating different corners of Iraq on one stage—there are tiled walls, crumbling concrete slabs, scaffolding, a pool of water under the stage, and sheets of plastic, strung like walls of a makeshift shelter, hanging from ropes. Actress Najla Said (daughter of scholar and public intellectual Edward Said, who wrote the post-colonialist classic Orientalism) switches between characters, modifying her accent and clothing, but none of her personas whisk us out of the theater. As an actor, she seems too cerebral and calculated—we can watch her think through her characters, breaking the dramatic spell, keeping the stories from singing.

But the stories! There is the leftist, Scotch-swilling intellectual who says she supports the U.S. invasion: “I worked for peace in Vietnam and Chile, but Saddam was the greater enemy”; and the *NSYNC girl’s tale, about her father being taken away because of something she let slip at school about how the government has no jurisdiction over the stars; and the doctor in the sewage-flooded hospital, who has spent decades patching up the victims of this or that ideology, and is depressed by the mysteriously rampant cancers in her patients. The most effective moment comes in the form of a recording—an Iraqi man, leaving a message on his niece’s answering machine in New York after September 11. The niece says her American family was satisfied to hear she wasn’t killed secondhand, but the Iraqis kept calling and calling and calling, professing their love and solidarity, until they all got to hear her voice on the phone. Now the niece—presumably playwright Heather Raffo—watches the war on TV from New York, unable to get her family on the telephone. That 9/11 was used as part of a specious justification for going to war adds a potent bitterness to the scene.

But Desire’s verisimilitude is its crutch—the moral force of the stories does not, cannot, make up for the dramatic weakness of the play.