sell outs
October 30, 2009
Hooray!
9 Parts of Desire is SOLD OUT tonight, Friday, Oct 30, and Sunday, Nov 1. There are only 48 tickets remaining for the run on Saturday, Oct 31 at 7:30 PM. Available at www.moolelo.net or 619-342-7395.
mo`olelo’s next production
October 28, 2009
Mo`olelo’s next full production will be
self (the remix)
Written and performed by Robert Farid Karimi
Directed by Ellen Sebastian Chang
February 24 – March 21, 2010
Mo`olelo at The 10th Avenue Theatre
930 10th Avenue, San Diego CA 92101
self (the remix) is a hip hop, spoken word, one man play that mixes together stories, movement, and music to tell the tale of a first generation child of Iranian and Guatemalan immigrants growing up in California in the 1970s and 1980s in the shadow of the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Acclaimed playwright and performer Robert Farid Karimi, accompanied with a soundscape created by DJ D Double, tells a “remixed” autobiographical tale of a boy struggling to learn about manhood, nationhood, and neighborhood with the voices and music of his environment helping him along.
Information: 619-342-7395 or tickets@moolelo.net
Save up to $17!
Advance ticket vouchers for self (the remix) are now on sale. The vouchers cost only $18 and are good for any performance of self (the remix), including opening night! When you purchase your ticket early, you assist Mo`olelo with cash flow and ensure you get the best deal for the show!
To order an advance voucher, call 619-342-7395, OR mail a check payable to “Mo`olelo” to:
Mo`olelo Performing Arts Company
PO Box 710564
San Diego, CA 92171-0564
Your voucher will be mailed to you.
BOOKING GROUPS NOW
We are now booking university groups, high schools, nonprofit organizations and other groups of 10 or more for the production. Call 619-342-7395 if you’re interested in exploring how to bring your group to the show — discounts are available for groups of 10 or more.
staged reading: 26 MILES
October 28, 2009
Mo`olelo Performing Arts Company invites you to join us for a staged reading of 26 MILES written by Quiara Alegria Hudes, Pulitzer Prize finalist and book writer for the Tony-winning musical IN THE HEIGHTS.
About the play
The time is 1986. Olivia is a half-Cuban, half-Jewish 15-year old. She doesn’t fit in at school and she doesn’t fit in at home with her new step-mother’s rules. After a failed attempt to swallow sixteen ibuprofens, she calls her estranged mother and the two embark on a spontaneous road trip, searching for antiques, buffalo, and a remedy for their broken hearts.
Featuring: Rachael Van Wormer, Catalina Maynard*, Lance Arthur Smith*, and Claudio Raygoza.
Directed by Seema Sueko*
*member of Actors Equity Association, the union of professional actors and stage managers in the United States.
Reading Details:
What: Staged Reading of 26 MILES
When: Tuesday, November 17, 2009, 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Where: The 10th Avenue Theatre, 930 10th Avenue, San Diego, CA 92101 (Downtown, on 10th Avenue between Broadway & E Street).
Parking: Metered street parking (free after 6 PM); OR there is a $5 lot at the NE corner of 11th Ave and E Street. The machine accepts Visa, MasterCard or exact cash.
Admission: FREE
Suggested donation of $10 at the door.
Reservations: Space is limited. RSVP to tickets@moolelo.net or call 619-342-7395.
last week of the run!
October 26, 2009
There are only FIVE performances remaining of 9 PARTS OF DESIRE… and TWO of those are already SOLD OUT!
We have tickets available for:
Thursday, Oct 29 at 7:30 PM (Post show discussion)
Friday, Oct 30 at 7:30 PM
Saturday, Oct 31 at 7:30 PM
Order your tickets at www.moolelo.net or 619-342-7395.
Wine, Cheese & Wisdom with Lou Spisto
October 18, 2009
Join us on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 for a Wine, Cheese & Wisdom event featuring Lou Spisto, CEO/Executive Producer of The Old Globe.
Mo`olelo’s Wine, Cheese & Wisdom events are opportunities for local artists and audiences to glean wisdom from a nationally-recognized theater practitioner and for Mo`olelo to bridge the gap between artist and audience and between local and national. The informal wine & cheese reception at 5:30 p.m. will be followed by a facilitated chat and Q&A with Mr. Spisto from 6:00 – 7:00 p.m.. Learn about his career path, his thoughts on the future of American theater and more. You can find Mr. Spisto’s biography here.
Event Details:
What: Wine, Cheese & Wisdom with Lou Spisto
When: Tuesday, November 3, 2009; Wine & Cheese at 5:30 p.m.; Wisdom from 6:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Where: The 10th Avenue Theatre, 930 10th Avenue, San Diego, CA 92101 (Downtown, on 10th Avenue between Broadway & E Street).
Parking: Metered street parking; or there is a $5 lot at the NE corner of 11th Ave and E Street. The machine accepts Visa, MasterCard or exact cash.
Admission: FREE!
We request audiences help out by bringing a bottle of wine or cheese and crackers to share, or make a $10 donation at the door.
Reservations: Space is limited. RSVP to tickets@moolelo.net or call 619-342-7395.
Pat Launer’s review!
October 15, 2009
http://www.sdnn.com/sandiego/2009-10-14/things-to-do/pat-launer-on-san-diego-theater-desire-woolf
UNDER THE VEIL
THE SHOW: “Nine Parts of Desire,” a drama set in Iraq, at Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company
Five months ago, Heather Raffo returned to her alma mater, the University of San Diego, to receive the 2009 Author E. Hughes Career Achievement Award from the College of Arts and Sciences. While she was there, she performed excerpts from her stunning play, “Nine Parts of Desire,” which she began writing while she was at USD (1996-1998), pursuing her MFA. In 1993, she had traveled to Iraq, the land of her father, where she spent part of her youth. She met, ate with and lived with many Iraqis, and over the course of a decade, distilled the stories down to nine women who touched and moved her, whom she couldn’t forget. Using only an abaya, a traditional Iraqi black, robe-like garment, she inhabited the various characters just by changing the way she draped or wore the cloth. It was a stirring, affecting performance, one for which she garnered acclaim in London and New York where, in 2004, she won a Lucille Lortel Award for Best Solo Show and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize Special Commendation. Career Achievement, indeed.
The play is an ideal match for Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company, which specializes in telling the stories of those whose voices are rarely heard. The mission of the vagabond group (last year in residence at the La Jolla Playhouse), focuses on speaking for varied and under-served communities and bringing new groups to the theater. Instead of presenting the play as a solo show, they’ve expanded it to three actors, each playing three roles. And they do something Raffo herself couldn’t manage, in spite of her prodigious talent. The women interact, they support each other, they sometimes echo each other’s words. Under the expert, delicate and meticulous direction of Janet Hayatshahi, they waft in and out of these heart-rending stories, passing one abaya among them, wearing it guardedly or carelessly, over the face or off the shoulder, as chador or as painting smock. Beneath it, they’re dressed in modern Western clothes, showing us that they’re really just like us, only in extremis.
They are all survivors, women of profound courage and strength, who share a great deal: guilt for the fortitude and good fortune that has kept them alive, grief for those they’ve lost and a deep and abiding love of their country. The play’s title refers not only to the number of women. It’s borrowed from a non-fiction book by Australian reporter Geraldine Brooks, who in turn quotes from Iman Ali in the Koran: “God made desire in ten parts and gave nine to women.” The proverb is often used as justification for cloistering and covering Islamic women. For Raffo, it’s an allusion to the earthiness and frank sexuality of the women who captivated her. But their most fervent desire may be for their lives to return to a semblance of normality, to a place of peace, where they can live openly, vibrantly, unencumbered by laws, rules, subjugation and heavy cloth.
The most colorful character is Layal, based on the artist Layla Al-Attar, who became curator of the Saddam Art Center (painting innumerable portraits of the leader) by placating the regime, offering her body to anyone who would help her stay alive. But Layla/Layal, a forceful, free-spirited woman, also made very subversive pictures, displayed in the upper floors of the Center – risky paintings, of nude women, that surreptitiously denounce the regime. She was only successful up to a point, killed in a U.S. missile attack in 1993. Also memorable is Amal, the lusty Bedouin, who has left two husbands and, still filled with hope, pursues a third, only to be devastated when he abandons her.
The actors speak in varied accents (coached by the Old Globe’s dialect-maven, Jan Gist) and move deftly through the evocative set (David F. Weiner), a snakelike array of water vessels and bowls, symbolizing both the daily tasks of a woman and the all-important River Euphrates. The background is a wall of blue-green Moorish architecture, the floors strewn with pillows. And there’s one tree, an important image in the art-work of Layal.
That unforgettable character is marvelously inhabited by Lisel Gorell-Getz, who underscores the character’s unshakable lust for life. She also does wonderful work as the doctor who only delivers deformed and diseased babies, due to the various contaminants left behind by the war; and Umm Ghada, sole survivor of the Amirya shelter where 400 people died, including her nine children, after an American, Gulf War bombing. Now she offers ghoulishly dispassionate tours of the place, and she asks us to sign the guestbook, too. They all speak to us directly, as if we’re their interviewers, or friends – or their eyewitnesses.
Dré Slaman is excellent as a wide-eyed 8-year-old girl who misses her father, realizing too late that her youthful, casual remark may have been responsible for his kidnapping and death. Slaman also makes a strong statement as Mullaya, the professional mourner and Huda, the whiskey-drinking exile who feels she should have been in Baghdad during the worst of it.
Frances Anita Rivera is powerful as the beggarwoman, Nanna; as Amal, the Bedouin; and as the Iraqi-American (based, presumably, on Raffo herself), fingering her rosaries as she compulsively recites the names of the relatives in Iraq whom she’s unable to contact, hoping they’re still alive. At the end, all the women join in the litany of names. And then, in a rising chorus, they repeat the only words an Iraqi relative knows in English, “I love you,” until it crescendos into a prayer, a plea for recognition, not only from the relatives, but from the world.
THE LOCATION: Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company at the 10th Avenue Theatre, 930 10TH Ave. (619) 342-7395. http://electrictemple.net
THE DETAILS: Tickets: $22-$27. Thursday-Saturday at 7:30 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m., through November 1.
THE BOTTOM LINE: BEST BET
Keli Dailey’s review!
October 15, 2009
http://www.signonsandiego.com/entertainment/street/2009/10/documentary_theatre_the_war_th.html
DOCUMENTARY THEATRE: The war, through Iraqi women’s eyes
Cagefighting vs. Iraq
I’ll admit, I couldn’t tear myself away from World Extreme Cagefighting the other night — its tomato-pureed faces and broken bones — to watch a documentary on the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
(The doc, “No End in Sight,” a 2007 award winner, is slowing my Netflix flow down … to … a trickle.)
I know what you’re thinking. “What an emotional infant. Who chooses manufactured battles on Versus TV over insight into The Manufactured Occupation?”
Well, you and Michael Moore sound alike, because in his latest accusation (“Capitalism: A Love Story“) he basically said my preference for leg-lock, guillotine-choke entertainment proves the American empire is in its last gasps.
OK. I can accept that.
But before you add this to my “ruining civilization and running from Middle Eastern realities” tab, consider: Last Friday I had this amazing emotional connection to a play at 10th Avenue Theatre staged by Mo’olelo — “9 Parts of Desire,” a meditation on what it means to be an Iraqi woman now.
And, yes, I’d skip televised near-dismemberments to see this tale of torture, love, death and the Middle Eastern political landscape being shaped by Westerners, all told through monologues by nine Iraqi women.
Lovely monologue plays, character actresses
Give credit to the playwright, Heather Raffo, who originally performed all nine characters when “9 Parts” debuted in Scotland the year of the invasion.
At its best, “9 Parts of Desire” sheds light on an overlooked Iraqi diaspora through well-packaged flashes of monologue, just like the electric “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” And much like this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about the Congo (“Ruined“), Raffo bases her work on real, in-depth interviews with women tied emotionally or physically to a war zone. It’s “documentary theater.”
The desires in Raffo’s play parallel Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: food, safety, shelter, love, belonging, freedom, recognition. There’s a boho painter who refuses to leave her creative living in Baghdad; an exasperated doctor attending to radiation-exposed Basrans; a naive girl whose father disappeared under Saddam; a survivor of a U.S. attack on a bomb shelter; a pro-invasion exile in London; an old woman; a female mullah; an American whose family in Iraq is under fire; a big-hearted Bedouin anxious for love.
The roles are split between three actresses: Lisel Gorell-Getz, who so completely disappears into her painter/doctor/survivor roles that I cannot describe her; Dre Slaman, who plays her older characters more capably than the younger one; and my new favorite character actress, Frances Anita Rivera (above left).
Rivera, who isn’t Middle Eastern, plays the Bedouin woman. Cloaked in a black robe, her strong jaw, blue eyes and expressive hands are all we can see as she addresses the audience directly about loves won and lost. It doesn’t come off as a caricature; I didn’t feel tired or abused by her broken English monologue: “How he say this? … I am shamed to my family. They think he slept with me that night we meet in Dubai and change his mind. I don’t have peace.”
But when Rivera plays the American helplessly watching war developments on CNN, I was less interested in her performance. Something about that vignette seemed abstract, its rhythm forced.
Still, Rivera is the closest character actress to Anna Deveare Smith I’ve found locally. In “9 Parts” — her first show since a motorcycle accident interrupted her performance at Compass Theatre earlier this year — she is essential. And the production is striking.
And check out “Wishes/Umniat,” the Arab-American artwork on the floor above the theater
Anne Marie Welsh’s review!
October 14, 2009
From the North County Times: http://www.nctimes.com/entertainment/arts-and-theatre/theatre/article_2fab314f-e4b9-51ca-bad2-ab3e7cd7fd34.html
THEATER REVIEW: Voices of Iraqi women ring out in well-staged ‘Desire’
ANNE MARIE WELSH – For the North County Times | Posted: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 8:55 am
Impassioned or world-weary, naive or cynical, young or old, the nine Iraqi women of Heather Raffo’s “9 Parts of Desire” are survivors, as well as potent reminders of the psychic costs of war and brutal dictatorships.
Mo’olelo Performing Arts’ often heart-stopping production of the 2004 play brings these nine suffering, yet enduring women to vivid individual life. Though there was too much superfluous movement early on and the occasional muddle of voices on opening night, at its best, director Janet Hayatashi’s production is Mo’olelo’s most powerful since “Remains,” the company’s debut offering written by company founder Seema Sueko.
Playwright Raffo, a Catholic Iraqi-American, first visited family in Iraq in 1993. She began interviewing real women and imagining others while she was still a student in the master of fine arts program jointly offered by the University of San Diego and the Old Globe. Her many years of research and writing led her to create neither a theatrical documentary nor a piece of political propaganda.
Instead, she wrote a one-woman play in which these unexpectedly varied voices speak to us in monologues, but also to one another in counterpoint and echo, as if layer upon layer of the hidden lives of everyday Iraqis were being stripped bare. Each voice is different, distinctive; together they reveal the tortured history of a multifaceted culture in crisis.
Initially, Raffo played all the roles herself, a tour de force that won performance and playwriting awards for her all over the world. At Mo’olelo, Hayatashi cast three women, dividing the nine roles among them.
Actor Frances Anita Rivera, new to San Diego, plays a full-bodied Bedouin woman, Amal, as well as the Raffo-based blond American desperate to connect to her extended family in Baghdad. And what a local debut Rivera makes. In both parts, she radiates warmth and vitality, but especially as Amal. A cheery fat woman looking the world over for love, Rivera’s oft-married, often-disappointed Amal has so much spontaneity and life, her spirit spills over into the audience.
As the American, clutching a rosary and reciting the names of her cousins unreachable since the American invasion, Rivera embodies the heartbreak of loving families frayed by emigration and war. And Rivera also roams convincingly about as a Mother Courage-like war profiteer, a stooped, iconic figure in black robes jauntily selling stolen goods to survive.
Actor Dre Slaman proves just as riveting in her role as Huda, a sophisticated Scotch-sipping, intellectual exile in London. Huda’s spine-chilling tales of Saddam Hussein’s brutality make their own case for removing him and the “animals” he created. An inveterate protester and world traveler, Huda has never forgotten the screams of a baby tossed into a sack of hungry cats, its mother raped by Saddam’s stooges, all to torture the child’s father in a nearby cell.
Slaman has a solidity and earthiness on stage that colors even her portrayal of a girl whose school essay about the stars quite by accident implicates her father, who soon disappears. The child loves ‘N Sync, wants to meet Justin Timberlake, yet knows the difference between an M-16 and a Kalashnikov, and the name of every falling bomb and missile by its sound.
The most surprising character is Layal, a famous self-infatuated Iraqi painter who collaborated with the regime, ran the Saddam Art Center, and thus was able to paint famous nudes and portraits — she tells us — like one of a kidnapped woman, covered with honey by her torturers and set upon by Dobermans.
Lisel Gorell-Getz plays this demanding role of a contradictory, self-justifying artist with passion and panache. Her portrayal, still spotty on opening night, will no doubt smooth itself over the course of the three-week run. Best showcased before this in deftly comic parts, Gorell-Getz also morphs into a bereft mother who has turned the Al-Amaria bomb shelter into a museum of death where American bombs from the first Gulf War incinerated her family.
David Weiner created the set, its clutter perhaps meant to suggest the fragmentation of Iraqi culture. The playing space is cut by the Tigris as a river of shoes. Ladders, empty picture frames, and doorways conjure various sites mentioned in the monologues, though this is one play in which the writing itself is so detailed, strong and evocative the production could well play on a bare stage with a minimum of movement.
Media and government attention have shifted to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where it perhaps should have been after the terrorist attacks eight years ago. Yet “9 Parts of Desire” feels even more significant now as a lasting work of art wrested from the damage wrought by Saddam Hussein’s regime and America’s injudicious responses to it.
“9 Parts of Desire”
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and Oct. 22-24 and 30-31; 2 p.m. Sunday and Oct. 25 and Nov. 1
Where: Mo’olelo at 10th Avenue Theatre, 930 10th Ave., San Diego
Tickets: $15-$18
Info: 619-342-7395
Web: moolelo.net.
Baghdad Theatre
October 14, 2009
Found this article on Telegraph.co.uk. Thought our blog readers and audiences of 9 Parts of Desire might enjoy reading it:
After six years, Baghdad’s theatre opens its doors again
As the lights dimmed and the Iraq National Theatre’s curtain rose to a wave of applause, six men in garish white suits and three rather more soberly dressed women started to dance and sing a love song.
Read the rest here.
Janice Steinberg’s review!
October 13, 2009
From the San Diego Union Tribune:
Theater review
3 women play 9 who love, desire amid Iraqi war, loss
2:00 a.m. October 13, 2009
DETAILS
“9 Parts of Desire”
Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through Nov. 1
Where: Mo’olelo at The 10th Avenue Theatre
Tickets: $22-$35
Phone: (619) 342-7395
Online: moolelo.net
Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company’s lyrical production of “9 Parts of Desire” weaves its spell from the moment you enter the 10th Avenue Theatre. Scenic designer David F. Weiner has created a Moorish-arched bazaar in which several dozen metal bowls, gleaming on two low platforms, illuminate the simple beauty in everyday kitchen ware.
In the same way, the nine Iraqi women whose voices are heard in Heather Raffo’s play reveal the poetry in their everyday lives — and the determination to persevere in the midst of war and loss.
Raffo, an American actor-playwright whose father was born in Iraq, initially interviewed women in Iraq in the 1990s and used that material in a short play for the University of San Diego/Old Globe MFA program.
That piece evolved into the one-woman “9 Parts of Desire,” which she debuted in Edinburgh in 2003 and later performed in London and New York, receiving a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize Special Commendation and a Lucille Lortel Award for Best Solo Show.
In Mo’olelo’s production, which opened on Saturday at the 10th Avenue Theatre, three actors play the nine roles. Under Janet Hayatshahi’s sensitive direction, the women become one another’s witnesses and allies, sometimes playfully and sometimes tenderly handing off the black abaya whose wearer (or holder) takes center stage.
The play’s title (also used by author Geraldine Brooks for her book about women in the Muslim world) quotes from a seventh-century imam: “God created sexual desire in 10 parts. He gave nine parts to women, one to man.”
Certainly, some of the women — whom Raffo has said she quoted nearly verbatim — express exuberant sexual desire. Layal, the worldly painter who wears the abaya off her shoulders like an evening wrap, declares herself “hungry for (love) every morning like I have never eaten before,” and the chatty Bedouin, Amal, hopes for husband number three.
But love isn’t the only thing these women want. An eight-year-old girl, kept home because of the conflict, yearns for an education. A Basra doctor wants to deliver healthy babies; instead, contaminants released by the war are producing newborns who are horribly deformed. An Iraqi-American woman, seemingly a stand-in for Raffo, says the rosary using the names of all her family members in Iraq.
As the personal inevitably entwines with the politics of war, the stories get grimmer. Umm Ghada offers a tour of the bomb shelter, hit by U.S. bombs in the Gulf War, where her family died. Nanna approaches strangers on the street, trying to sell things “from good family” so that she can eat.
Yet the play ultimately celebrates the women’s life-force and the power of art, in the hands of Hayatshahi and a fine ensemble cast.
Lisel Gorell-Getz gives the show’s standout performance as Layal, daring, brittle and almost successful at hiding her fear behind bravado. Gorell-Getz also plays the doctor and Umm Ghada.
Dré Slaman shifts from the big-eyed liveliness of the young girl, to a Scotch-drinking former Communist living in exile in London, to a professional mourner.
Poignant in her role as Nanna, Frances Anita Rivera on opening night was ardent but a bit over-caffeinated as Amal and the American.
Using three actors has led to a few changes in Raffo’s script, with mixed results. It’s jarring when an actor echoes a line spoken by the featured character. On the other hand, a gripping moment occurs when the American repeats “I love you” like a mantra to keep everyone from harm, and the other women join in.
Among the excellent production team, dialect coach Jan Gist deserves special mention. Rather than speaking generic Iraqi-accented English, each character’s speech is fine-tuned to reflect her education and background. At least to this ear, they sounded convincing — and drew us into the vital stories the women had to tell.
Union-Tribune
