Category Archives: Lynn Nottage

Ruined (2008) by Lynn Nottage

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Scene from Lynn Nottage's Ruined, performed at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Ruined by Lynn Nottage. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2009. World premiere: Goodman Theatre, Chicago, November 2008. New York premiere: Manhattan Theatre Club, February 2009. Text available from amazon.com here.

Africa has been a continent in violent crisis for decades, and stories about the continent and its catastrophes have rarely made it to the American stage. Lynn Nottage’s Ruined is a powerful play exploring the violence against women in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and its power was recognized when it was awarded a slew of prizes following its 2008 premiere: the Drama Desk Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and finally the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for best American drama.

Originally Nottage was inspired to transplant Bertolt Brecht‘s Mother Courage, itself set during the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century, to contemporary Congo. The play still bears some marks of this origin: Mama Nadi operates a bar and brothel in a small Congolese mining town. Her brothel serves both government troops and rebels, as circumstances dictate; it also serves as a refuge for the young women she simultaneously cares for and exploits. Although she tries to maintain a safe distance from the politics that ravages the region, the women and she herself are still touched by it — the sexual violence directed at women in the Congo have left bodies mutilated and individuals shamed. Her heart permits her to accept into her home women who are “ruined” through this violence and therefore unsuitable as prostitutes or potential mothers (the end of the play reveals that she herself is “ruined”), and though Mama Nadi, like Anna Fierling, manages to remain an ambivalent symbol of hope or at the very least survival at the end of the play, Nottage rather more sentimentally allows her to accept the marriage proposal of Christian, a travelling salesman.

“God, I don’t know what those men did to you, but I’m sorry for it. I may be an idiot for saying so, but I think we, and I speak as a man, can do better,” Christian tells her after she confesses that she is “ruined” (101) — and one certainly hopes so, given what has gone on before, though “We’ll try harder” is unlikely to provoke much more than a raised eyebrow from anyone who still has half their wits about them. There is very powerful writing indeed in Ruined, especially about the violence thrust by men upon women, and in a way Christian’s speech, coming at the end of all of it, seems somewhat wishful, though this sentimental weakness may be an inevitable and unfortunate result of the melodramatic form that Nottage has chosen for the play. In abandoning Brechtian dramaturgy[1], the play instead becomes beholden to the procrustean bed of this melodramatic genre. This is not to denigrate this form — Marc Robinson recognizes it as perhaps the quintessentially American dramatic genre in The American Play — but to indicate both the strengths and weaknesses of political melodrama when it comes to a 21st century American theatre.

Political plays come in all shapes and sizes, and a Brechtian agit-prop has rarely served American drama, or its political function, well. On the other hand, melodrama is more immediately appealing to a broad audience which does not necessarily share, at least not consciously, a general ideological orientation in one direction or another. Perhaps the most effective political play in American history was the 19th century anti-slavery potboiler Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the dramatic version of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel that was immensely popular in the years immediately before and immediately following the Civil War and which staged the crisis of slavery before the eyes of a mass American public. Nottage and director Whoriskey bring the issue of Congolese violence against women into the genre of melodrama as an attempt to more emotionally engage the audience in a crisis which is half a world away and rarely reported in the Western press.

Obviously the play succeeds on this level, but the melodramatic form runs a risk: the emotional and narrative closure that the genre requires may provide a catharsis which exhausts an energy that might have alternatively led to action. What is left of any Brechtian cultural analysis of the play is marginalized, and marginalized at the expense of the larger issues that the narrative explores. The single white character of the play, Mr. Harari, is a diamond merchant eager to do business with whoever may be in control of the mines, rebels or government troops; this renders him an interesting parallel to Mama Nadi herself, but this goes relatively unexplored (it’s doubtful Brecht would have left it as a mere irony). With a certain Brechtian skepticism, Mama Nadi notes that though UN peacekeepers may bring some stability to the region, they do not bring the economic activity upon which Mama Nadi depends for her well-being: “How the hell are we supposed to do business? [The 'blue helmets'] are draining our blood,” Mama Nadi complains, Anna-Fierling-like, towards the end of the play (95) — though unlike Mama Nadi, Brecht saw Mother Courage as fully complicit in the wars and violence which destroyed her family, rendering her a more interesting character and Mother Courage ultimately a more challenging play. And finally, the potential redemption Mama Nadi finds in the character Christian (Biblical reference noted, as Brecht would surely note as well) seems tacked on — a reward to the audience and to the character for enduring the emotional terror of some of the play’s darker sequences and monologues. But real life, such as it is, is not melodrama.

In the context of American drama after 9/11, this is one of the ways in which American dramatists cope with the outside world in the rare moments that they do. Though written by a woman of color, race has a relatively minor role to play in Ruined, Mr. Harari notwithstanding; and as Alexis Soloski pointed out in a Guardian essay about the play’s reception of the Pulitzer Prize, “The Pulitzer is supposed to go to ‘a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life.’ Nottage is an American author and her play is eminently distinguished – easily the best new drama of its season. But Ruined doesn’t at all meet the latter criteria.” Whatever this says about the Pulitzer Prize or about Ruined is a subject for another time. Ruined is probably far more powerful on the stage than on the page, where its language often seems self-conscious and its emotional manipulations are more intellectually recognizable; most melodramas are. The play looks to have a rich post-premiere life ahead of it (a production opens at Washington DC’s Arena Stage in April). It demonstrates that at least this one strand of American political play — an uneasy combination of melodrama and agit-prop, which nonetheless has a noble history from Stowe to Odets, O’Neill and Miller — is alive and healthy in the 21st century. Whether the form, a subgenre of realism, can contain more provocative calls upon the audience’s self-image in the decade after 9/11 is a question that might be tested by the more provocative and controversial Neil LaBute, whose The Break of Noon I will examine next.

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Footnotes
  1. In her introduction to the published text of the play, director Kate Whoriskey writes that, “As we interviewed more and more people [in the Congo], it became clear that we did not want to be beholden to Brecht’s ideas. Lynn was interested in portraying the lives of Central Africans as accurately as she could, and she found Mother Courage to be a false frame.” (p. xi) [↩]