Kate Whoriskey, the new artistic director of Intiman Theatre, made her bones as a Major American Artist with Ruined, a drama about a brothel surrounded by war in the Congo.
She and playwright Lynn Nottage (Intimate Apparel) developed the work over six years, traveled to Uganda to conduct interviews with women who fled the Congolese violence, premiered it at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, took it to the Manhattan Theatre Club, and walked away with a Pulitzer Prize.
Theirs is an object lesson in how to develop new American plays, a topic of serious local and national discussion these days: a commission from a regional theater; a close collaboration between a writer and a director; the time, money, and resources to write and research; a premier production (many theaters want premieres but shun seconds) followed by a second production that netted a pile of awards and nominations for its writer, director, cast, and composer. (Ruined has a few key Afropop barroom songs for drums and guitar by Dominic Kanza, who went on to play guitar and bass for Shakira’s official 2010 World Cup song.)
Now Whoriskey has brought Ruined to make her bones in Seattle, a city curious to see whether the young director—anointed by outgoing director Bartlett Sher as his heir apparent—was the right choice to lead Intiman. The curiosity intensified after the run of The Thin Place (the theater’s first play after Whoriskey officially took over), a messy and tepidly received docudrama based on interviews with local residents about their relationship with God.
But Ruined, featuring many actors from the award-winning MTC production, is a strong comeback. Originally inspired by Mother Courage, Bertolt Brecht’s canonical and form-busting play about a woman trying to live (and make a profit) through a long European war, Ruined took a more traditional shape after Nottage and Whoriskey began their African sojourn. The result is more Tennessee Williams than Brecht, a drama of emotions and relationships—instead of Mother Courage‘s colder, more polemical approach—between the employees and patrons of a small brothel in a Congolese jungle, where the stone-hard Mama Nadi (played by the regal and single-named Portia) demands that visitors drop their bullets in a bin by the front door.
Derek McLane’s set pushes the brothel action to the front of the stage, while a tall jungle of tree trunks looms behind, occasionally echoing with gunfire or lit to reveal men with drawn guns. As much as Nadi would like to banish the war from her establishment, it keeps creeping through her door—gently, at first, when a small-time trader and entrepreneur named Christian (Russell G. Jones) brings Nadi two young women. They come into the bar flinching, terrified, with embers of buried rage shining behind their eyes. One, named Salima (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), is a half-blind wife and mother who was abducted and kept for years as a soldiers’ concubine, then rejected by her husband when she tried to return. The other, named Sophie (Condola Rashad), has been “ruined”: raped with a bayonet, her sexual organs mutilated. (She becomes the brothel’s bookkeeper and house singer.) “What is your name?” Nadi asks.
“Sophie,” the young woman says.
“And do you have a smile?”
Nadi is reluctant to take the girls on—”Take both, feed them as one,” Christian advises—but helps them both find their smiles in a complicated relationship that walks somewhere between protection and exploitation. Bernstine and Rashad give deep and turbulent performances as women who have been horribly wounded, but whose wounds don’t constitute the entirety of their characters. Another prostitute, the proud, ostentatious, and jealous Josephine (Cherise Boothe), says she’s the daughter of a village chief and has been thrust into Mama Nadi’s house by bad luck.
And then there are the men. Soldiers come and go in the bar, transposed from one side of the conflict to the other by double casting. “This fucking war, ay mother, no one owns it!” complains Mr. Harari, a white diamond trader played by Tom Mardirosian. “It’s everybody’s and nobody’s. It keeps fracturing and redefining itself, militias form overnight and suddenly a drunken foot soldier with a tribal vendetta is a rebel leader and in possession of half of the enriched land, but you can’t reason with him, because he’s only thinking as far as his next drink.”
“You know better, Mr. Harari,” Nadi pointedly reminds him. “You’re in the Congo. Things slip through our fingers like butter.”
And so it goes: Soldiers come to drink and then to pillage, Salima’s husband, in a soldier’s uniform, comes looking for her, the good luck rolls in with the bad. Though it ends with a sentimentalism and symmetry that feels slightly too melodious for the rest of the play’s discord—Brecht, famous hater of empathy in theater, would’ve reeled—Nottage and Whoriskey have built a multifaceted drama as complicated and changeable as life.
The Laramie Project has aged well: Ten years after its premiere, the dissection of a small Wyoming town shocked by the torture and murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard still stings. The documentary drama, based on interviews with Laramie residents by Moisés Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project, has been something of a celebrity parade over the years. Performers from Peter Fonda to Cyndi Lauper to Christina Ricci have taken their turns as part of the Laramie ensemble, in which actors play the actors who originally conducted the interviews and the characters they interviewed—social workers, doctors, a police officer afraid she’d contracted HIV from Shepard’s blood, local meth users, the bartender who saw Shepard leave the Fireside Lounge with his killers (two young men who savagely beat him, hung him on a fence, and left him to die in the cold October night), a Catholic priest, a Baptist preacher (who brutally says during his interview that he hoped Shepard had “time to reflect on his lifestyle” and how it’d led him to this bloody end before he slipped into his coma), and several others.
The strength of The Laramie Project relies on its ensemble, and director Greg Carter (of Strawberry Theatre Workshop, which won a Stranger Genius Award in 2007) has assembled a quality team, with Alycia Delmore (Humpday), Galen Joseph Osier (Crime and Punishment at Intiman), and six others. Nick Garrison, best known for his musical-theater performances (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Cabaret), gives frankly natural performances as a nerdy academic adviser and a drawling, country queer in a denim and sheepskin jacket.
Some of the sections where the Strawberry actors play Tectonic’s actors ring false—their “sharing” of each others’ diaries and “spontaneously” laughing as they recall the interviews feel stiff and forced. Part of the failure lies with the script, which should have the actors-playing-actors bits severely edited down. Hearing about Tectonic’s process of collecting the material becomes less interesting with time. But when the actors slip into their small-town characters, it becomes clear that The Laramie Project is much bigger than Matthew Shepard or Laramie, Wyoming, or the Tectonic Theater Project. At its best, the play is big enough to encompass small towns all over the world where people draw battle lines—based on race, class, religion, sexual orientation, whatever—and what happens when violence explodes along those borders. 
I saw “Ruined” last night. Strong performances by all, even with an understudy in the lead. Seattle is very fortunate to have this production here.
Regarding ‘Laramie’, I’d go farther- the actors laughing as they recreated interviews among themselves actually seemed rather condescending, like ‘weren’t some those hicks hyesterical?” (Shawn Law’s Sgt Hing was especially an example of this, as when Garrison put on a clip on tie and said “Wait for it” Ha Ha Ha Ha. Laramie’s just like Mayberry RFD, ain’t it?). Staging it so that the group was often performing these little recreations for themselves accented that occasional smugness. (The portrayal of the drama professor Rebeccal Hilleker came off like something from sketch comedy). I don’t think this is what the Tectonic group intended at all in their depiction of the townspeople. It often felt like actors playing caricature rather than trying to portray real people responding to real events. Some moments were breezed through robotically (Matthew Shepard’s funeral)- some were overly wrought (Aaron’s discovery of Matthew’s body was as though Nick Garrison had found the baby Jesus in a rubbish bin). A little more heart and a little less winking seemed in order.
And p.s.- while one of the townspeople was supposed to be from Texas, people in Wyoming actually don’t have discernable accents. I heard alot of Southern drawls being thrown around, which only added to the impression of caricaturing.
This is an interesting discussion and one we talked about a lot in rehearsal for ‘Laramie’. During the first week, we spent most of our time telling personal stories to one another. One of our discoveries was that amateur story-tellers do caricature people we are talking about–especially people that we love and admire, because we are just trying to capture the essence of that person’s physical presence instead of an imitation. The things that each of us are best known for are our idiosyncrasies. And we found that the common reaction by others who know and admire the people we’re embodying is, in fact, laughter–warm, appreciative laughter, not mocking. But I admit it’s a fine line, and we probably blew past it a couple of times in our ultimate performance.
That said, I would hesitate to presume what the Tectonics were intending in their script. Though it’s obvious that they were genuinely affected by the people they met in Laramie and surprised by the interconnectedness of the community, they didn’t give every character equal reverence. There are people whose mispronunciations, bad historical references, and bad facts are allowed in the script, while others are not. These interviews were carefully edited by the Tectonics to tell their version of this story (read Dennis Shepard’s entire 16-page court testimony if you want to talk about bias). I don’t think it’s unfair to say that they were making fun of some of what they heard.
I think the interesting question for “The Laramie Project” is whether it will survive as a memorial or as a play. The previous productions that I have seen were both very affecting–but less as drama, than in the way that a candlelight vigil is affecting. We took the approach at Strawshop that if we could recreate the conflict between the New York actors and the Wyoming subjects, we could find dramatic tension–the kind of tension that would be mandated if this was a work of fiction.
I agree with Brendan that there are places where that conceit runs against the structure of the play. On the other hand, it gave me a much greater appreciation for the mystery novel way that much of the script is constructed (in previous productions, I actually lost track of the sequence of events). And it allowed us to put heart where we thought it was called for, without setting up every line these poor people uttered on tape to be heard as timelessly profound.
This is an interesting discussion and one we talked about a lot in rehearsal for ‘Laramie’. During the first week, we spent most of our time telling personal stories to one another. One of our discoveries was that amateur story-tellers do caricature people we are talking about–especially people that we love and admire, because we are just trying to capture the essence of that person’s physical presence instead of an imitation. The things that each of us are best known for are our idiosyncrasies. And we found that the common reaction by others who know and admire the people we’re embodying is, in fact, laughter–warm, appreciative laughter, not mocking. But I admit it’s a fine line, and we probably blew past it a couple of times in our ultimate performance.
That said, I would hesitate to presume what the Tectonics were intending in their script. Though it’s obvious that they were genuinely affected by the people they met in Laramie and surprised by the interconnectedness of the community, they didn’t give every character equal reverence. There are people whose mispronunciations, bad historical references, and bad facts are allowed in the script, while others are not. These interviews were carefully edited by the Tectonics to tell their version of this story (read Dennis Shepard’s entire 16-page court testimony if you want to talk about bias). I don’t think it’s unfair to say that they were making fun of some of what they heard.
I think the interesting question for “The Laramie Project” is whether it will survive as a memorial or as a play. The previous productions that I have seen were both very affecting–but less as drama, than in the way that a candlelight vigil is affecting. We took the approach at Strawshop that if we could recreate the conflict between the New York actors and the Wyoming subjects, we could find dramatic tension–the kind of tension that would be mandated if this was a work of fiction.
I agree with Brendan that there are places where that conceit runs against the structure of the play. On the other hand, it gave me a much greater appreciation for the mystery novel way that much of the script is constructed (in previous productions, I actually lost track of the sequence of events). And it allowed us to put heart where we thought it was called for, without setting up every line these poor people uttered on tape to be heard as timelessly profound.
I agree that amateur story-tellers do tend to exaggerate- but these weren’t supposed to be amateurs- they’re supposed to be the (professional) Tectonic company. I know that the script reflects that there were moments when Tectonic chuckled at what some of the people said to them (at the end, one character says Matt Galloway said he’d like to know if open auditions would be held)- and I don’t think the townspeople are Christ-like either- but they are real human beings, not ‘types’. Had you performed it as though the actors were talking to the audiance, instead of each other, it would probably have diffused this somewhat. I also would expect that Nick Garrison’s ad-libbed asides “Wait for it” (before putting on a clip-on tie) and “Oh look, (Doc) spelt H-O-P-E out..” wouldn’t have been in there. I should’ve mentioned in my first posting that I think there are alot of commendable things about your production, I just felt you were off the mark in some of those areas I mentioned.