A CANDID SLICE OF SORDID HISTORY ON STAGE
                        Intended for Mature Audiences 
                                              By Carol Benet
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area theater
                                                                 Weeks starting March 20, 2011
                                                                 Vol. 13, No. 81
            BERKELEY---Currently running at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Pulitzer Prize winning Ruined is one of the toughest plays around.  It deals with the problems of women in war-ravaged Congo. 
            Playwright Lynn Nottage has created a believable yet harsh setting to describe the lives of women who have been uprooted from their towns, raped and abused by soldiers on all sides of the political spectrum.   By the end of this account, some have miraculously survived. 
            The play is a collaboration of three theaters, the Berkeley Rep, The Huntington Theatre Company,  and The La Jolla Playhouse. That means it plays to white, middle class and educated audiences. It is somewhat ironic to see this audience vis-a-vis the realities taking place on stage.  Yes, the movies paint a worse picture, but what happens on stage, with live actors, is always more immediate and more frightening.  Ruined is frankly a shocking play in its raw slice of live.
            The only part that makes the experience moderately entertaining, is the music.  Two live musicians accompany the main characters who sing their stories in the nightclub/brothel where the girls take refuge.  But they are far from safe, as they must perform as prostitutes in order to survive in this chaotic country where there are no good guys, only marauding tribal soldiers. 
            The girls and women who are “ruined” are those who have been sexually used, for no fault of their own.  They then become objects of disdain, ones who then can be used because they are no longer virgins. This is a staggering Catch 22, a reasoning used by the men of many African and Islamic countries.
            Salima (Pascale Armand) and Sophie (Carla Duren) come to Mama Nadi’s (Tonye Patano) brothel.  They are starving and homeless and working there is their only way to survive.  Salima was captured and abused for five months.  The area of the Congo is rich in coltan, a valuable mineral used by the west in cell phones, computers and televisions.  The tribes and their enemies---those acting as government soldiers---are eager to conquer this terrain because of its riches.  
            Mama is a sell-out to the system.  She is a successful entrepreneur just getting down to business.  She defends herself saying that she is doing a service for everyone, for the girls as well as for the soldiers. Her  brothel/nightclub is a popular place in the jungle  (cleverly designed by Clint Ramos) with its palm trees, thick tropical vegetation and mix of colorful, thrown-together decorations from slabs of concrete, lights, bric-a-brac and odds  n’ ends. 
            An itinerant merchant Christian (Oberon K.A. Adjepoing) provides the dialogue and a narration of what is happening in the brothel, while the singing and dancing explain the rest.   It gets quite raunchy, especially when Josephine (Zainab Jah) is doing her work to seduce and excite the soldiers.  But Commander Osembenge (Adrian Roberts) and Jerome (Wendell B. Franklin) don’t want the “ruined.” They want the weakest, youngest. 
            A tender scene between Salima and Fortune (Jason Bowen), the husband who rejected her after she was raped, shows how impossible it becomes to make things right again. 
            Read about this abuse in the New York Times,  you can simply turn the page. But on the local stage, you can't. At Berkeley Rep, the plight of the women of the Congo that have been so mistreated, 200,000 of them,  cannot be so readily ignored.
            Ruined by Lynn Nottage at Berkeley Repertory Theatre runs through April 10.  For info: (510) 647-2949 or go online.
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        © Carol Benet 2011
        Carol Benet is a regular theater reviewer for artssf.com.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly)focus on theater, dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into recordings by local artists, and a few departures into books (by authors of the region)as well.
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