Life During Wartime.(Ruined)(Theater review)

Chief among the many astonishments that the new Presidency brings to American culture is the fact that, with a strong black woman co-presiding over the White House, black femininity may break free, once and for all, from the notion of powerlessness; black female political strength may no longer be the notable exception but one of the shining rules. And if there's a contemporary American playwright who can manage a synthesis between the politics of the kitchen and the ways of the world, it's Lynn Nottage. In the introduction to her collection "Crumbs from the Table of Joy and Other Plays" (2004), which is reminiscent of Paule Marshall's 1983 essay "From the Poets in the Kitchen," Nottage wrote, "My plays were born in an orange-colored kitchen with a group of women seated around a mod Formica countertop. But my plays are not 'kitchen sink dramas.' My play-writing began inside my mother's gaze--that provocative way her eyes smiled after two glasses of Mondavi. Her gaze was warm, it was distant, magical, quixotic and at times even impenetrable." But it was another female relative--Nottage's great-grandmother--who inspired her remarkable 2003 drama, "Intimate Apparel." The time: 1905. The place: lower Manhattan. A black woman named Esther works as a seamstress, making "intimate apparel"--corsets and negligees--for a variety of women of different races and economic circumstances. Although she is in love with Mr. Marks, a Romanian Jewish immigrant who sells her fabric, Esther ends up marrying George, a Barbadian immigrant who courts her through letters while he's away helping to build the Panama Canal. Once George and Esther are married and settled in New York, however, George turns out to be a philanderer who's more interested in Esther's money than in her love. (He's after her savings, which she keeps stitched in a quilt.) And when Esther refuses, at first, to hand it over--"No. That half my life. Thousands of tiny stitches and yards of fabric passed through that old machine"--Nottage reveals herself to be a true poet of the heartbreakingly mundane.

Nottage, who is forty-four, has a large, propulsive talent. She works in the tradition of Eugene O'Neill and Theodore Dreiser. Like them, she wants to tell big stories about America. Although her latest work, "Ruined" (at the Manhattan Theatre Club, under the direction of Kate Whoriskey), is set in the present-day civil-war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, its drama could just as easily have unfolded amid the gang wars of South Central Los Angeles. Mama Nadi (Saidah Arrika Ekulona) owns a bar and brothel in a small mining town. Her establishment has a thatched roof, tables and chairs, a radio. (The sleeping quarters are in the rear.) The play takes place in this small world, which both is and isn't cut off from the surrounding universe of rape and murder. (Nottage was inspired to write this play after a trip to Ugandan refugee camps in 2004.) Mama Nadi's principal aim is to make money. Like Brecht's Mother Courage, on whom she is modelled, she believes that, in a ...