"Who-riskey Business" in the Penthouse

The Sorrento Hotel Penthouse was amazingly full for Monday's Night School symposium on Intiman's hit show Ruined, set in a Congo brothel. You can see the whole thing for $10 to $65 at Intiman, yet people paid $20 to see one scene read by stars Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Cherise Boothe and Victoire Charles, and then a panel discussion with them and director Kate Whoriskey, moderated by me.

Everybody knows this is the make-or-break moment for Bart Sher's successor, and it looks like she's made it.

The crowd also proved that Night School, Michael Hebb's imaginative series of cultural events at the Sorrento, is catching fire. In May, the New York Times hailed it as a recession-reversing trend in America's hotel biz, and the program has grown since. 

Monday was the first of a new Night School subcategory called No Curtain, because it strips away the barrier between you and the creators' process. I would've gladly paid $20 to get this privileged glimpse. Instead, I paid $7 for parking and got a free meal in the Sorrento's old-fashioned Fireside Room, with a remarkably strong Old Fashioned.

Read more after the jump.

Whoriskey explained how she and playwright Lynn Nottage went to Africa to research their intended update of Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, set in the Congo. Their interviews with the civil war's rape victims left them stunned.

"They thought we'd be like Peter Jennings," said Whoriskey. They didn't realize they were talking to powerless theatre people. They just wanted their story told.

So Nottage scrapped the Brecht idea and wrote a new play based on their testimony — though Whoriskey said the play doesn't use one word from the interviews and she and Nottage never listened to them again. But the cast and director clearly felt the heavy responsibility of reshaping that testimony as art, and the pressure forged a theatrical diamond. 

I panned Nottage's 2005 Intiman show Intimate Apparel for being lightweight. Ruined is the fulfillment of her promise, and Whoriskey's. And it did more for the war's victims than any newscast.

After the panel, Whoriskey asked me about Intiman's legendary '80s production of Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities, which attracted a huge queue of taxis waiting at each intermission for the fleeing audience hordes.

"It was beautiful and unendurable," I said. I'm glad it's over, that show, but its gritty, otherworldly set haunts me still. Others are haunted by the cost of its flop. Nothing daunted, Whoriskey vowed, "I'm going to do some Brecht!"

And I'm going to see it, even if it's In the Jungle of Cities.

Image: a scene from Ruined. Photo by Chris Bennion.