Why 'Ruined' is Seattle's Hot Ticket

Be wise and buy your tickets right now for Lynn Nottage's Ruined, the show that won the six big drama prizes (including the Pulitzer) and made Intiman director Kate Whoriskey's reputation. It's such an instant hit that even critics got turned away from last weekend's packed performances -- something that has not happened at Intiman in at least ten years. There was simply not one seat available. Boasting most of the talent from the original production, Ruined is a revelation. If you see one play a year, make it this one. (A scene from it was also enacted on July 12 at the Sorrento Hotel, where I moderated a panel with the show's creators.)

But Ruined is not what you may think it is. Yes, it's about the Congo civil war, which by 2007 had killed a Holocaust-sized 5.4 million. And it's about mass rape, used as a systematic terror tool. The play could have been agonizing, like the brilliant rape film Irreversible. I also worried that it was honored for the good it did for the victims' cause -- not for its artistic achievement. And because it's inspired by Brecht's Mother Courage, I feared it might be like Intiman's dazzling yet grueling 1980s production of In the Jungle of Cities, which set a record for audience members fleeing at intermission.

But the reason Ruined won such attention is that it's a well-made play dramatizing the emotional consequences of war, not atrocity itself. Like The Diary of Anne Frank, it fits unimaginable horror into a traditional, audience-friendly entertainment form, complete with excellent comedy. And it's a lot better than Anne Frank, which Whoriskey staged on Broadway, winning some raves but losing millions. Ruined will make money. Nottage is a true poet, and Whoriskey plunges us into the vivid world of a war-zone brothel in a jungle whose palm trees stretch out like infinite tombstones. And the cast! The one-name actress Portia soars as the courageous, interestingly morally ambiguous madame Mama Nadi -- when this lady tells a bloodspattered soldier to dump his bullets before he gets his drink, he obeys. Russell G. Jones is still more impressive as her versifying suitor and supplier Christian. He acts with his entire, remarkably supple body, crafting a sensitive, kinetic, riveting character.

Condola Rashad has the big, silent-cinema-sized eyes of her mother Phylicia Rashad (TV's Claire Huxtable and a sometime Seattle Rep director). If anything, Condola is better. As Sophie, one of Nadi's new girls -- a waitress, since she's too damaged to offer sex -- her eyes burn with shame and defiant pride, and her wounded gait conveys both crippling injury and tensile strength. Sophie's friend Salima (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) affectingly yearns for her husband, but dreads their reunion. Congolese rape victims are revictimized by everyone who once loved them. Cherise Boothe is a sparky live wire as Josephine, a chief's daughter betrayed by the tribe.

Brecht famously used his play to alienate emotions and highlight ideas. This show conveys ideas through emotion. Don't miss it.

Shows now through August 8 at the Intiman Theatre, 201 Mercer Street