This is why I didn't want to go see Lynn Nottage's play "Ruined," even after it won this year's Pulitzer prize for drama. "Ruined" is a play about women who've suffered the most awful kinds of violence and abuse in the civil war in the Congo, based on interviews with Congolese refugee women in Uganda: the woman above, Muzima Salima, is one of them. The "ruined" women of the play are not just victims of abduction, gang rape, etc. whose families and villages have renounced them. They are those women who have been so horrifically assaulted that they are no longer "good for sex," and so can't even scrape by as prostitutes. I didn't want to think about them or their plight. Shame on me.My friend B got me to go see "Ruined" with her tonight (she didn't want to go on her own), and I'm so glad she did. The production (on only until September 6th at Manhattan Theatre Club) is fantastic. The acting is brilliant. The set is gorgeous. And the play is powerfully but understatedly complex, with moments of levity as well as an underlying and often explosive tension. It has its share of predictable interactions (probably necessary with subject matter this challenging), but the overall shape of the story - who's the main character? what kind of story is this? what kind of resolution could there be for the characters' problems? - remains uncertain until the end (and, if you let it, beyond). What dare we hope for these characters, not wanting false comfort and yet heartbroken over their suffering? (Heartbroken doesn't begin to describe it actually.) There is resolution of a kind at the end, for some of the characters. But the uprooted, unsettled and yet not entirely hopeless world the play describes leaves the stronger impression.
The most important lines and scenes are wordless, carried by gestures, looks, and even the ways in which the main actresses hold their bodies - and those I'll remember for a long, long time. Go see it if you can.
