When theatergoers filed into the Geffen Playhouse last night, it was a clear evening, with just a hint of early autumn crispness to the air. When they re-emerged two and a half hours later, the world had been shrouded in a light fog, just enough to obscure the fine edges of buildings.

Filling those intervening two and a half hours was "Ruined," Lynn Nottage’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a modest whorehouse in the middle of the ongoing conflict in the Congo. A remarkably tidy theatrical presentation of the sprawling complexity of the horrors of that civil war, "Ruined" is a compelling examination of a message easier to ignore than to grapple with.

The entirety of the action takes place within the two rooms and front porch of Mama Nadi’s, a road house employing 10 girls and run by the formidably tough Mama herself (portrayed in a engaging array of levels by Portia).

Though able to demand bullets from the guns of soldiers while they are in her home, Mama is unable to resist the unusual goods of two additional women under the insistence of her friend-cum-smuggler Christian (a powerfully charming Russell. G Jones), despite the fact that they have been “ruined” – the play and the Congo’s euphemistic term not just for the genital mutilation of a woman, but for the enshrouding shame and community rejection visited upon her by the same act.

We have all heard this story, but we have rarely spent two hours with it. 

Another story we have heard is the mounting violence between an ever-diverging cast of militias, and as the conflict swells up around Mama’s place, the women dance, screw and serve beers to appease soldiers of all motives.

We hear each woman’s gasp-inducing story of exploitation, mark them bound together by dishonor they internalize on behalf of the world they wish to rejoin.

There is a gesture of uncharacteristic goodwill, an attempted escape, a botched escape, a death, a crescendo of gunfire, a boom. The temporary peace of the final scene brings a revelation, then an ending moment so absolutely fragile but undeniably upbeat that it scrambles the emotional core of the departing viewer.

“They wanted Peter Jennings and instead they had Lynn and Kate,” says Director Kate Whoriskey of the women she and the playwright interviewed in the development of the play. Indeed, as sung by the eponymously ruined Sophie (a bright-eyed, ungainly, perfectly calibrated Condola Rashad), “the bird still cries out to be heard,” and the production delivers on the uncomplicated duty to just speak the story the women of the Congo just want told.

But what does an audience want?

In theory we welcome being troubled and even acknowledged by action onstage – and here we are both, as when a soldier is the first to barter the newest warred-over mineral for a woman’s company – that mineral being the little bit of magic that makes smartphones possible.

The neat plotting and clean presentation of "Ruined," and the audible ease of the audience as the lights came up suggests that American audiences – even ones willing to spend $30 on an evening with African genocide – appreciate a toehold against overwhelming despair. Nottage acknowledges the sliver of optimism that has allowed her work to be accepted so widely, choosing engagement – any, and even late – over turning away from something too difficult to be told. 

 

Reach reporter Rebecca Kinskey here.

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