The Secret Birds, Tony Fitzpatrick at the DePaul Art Museum

Audubon Bird Guide, Eastern Land Birds, (c)1946, Doubleday

When I was about 4, my parents brought home a variety of little toy plastic birds. I can’t remember if they came gradually or all at once, but I recall a fairly large number and variety. They were probably purchased at Valueville or Shopper’s World. Lifelike replicas of their natural counterparts, each bird came in its own colorfully-printed paper box that identified the species, its habitat, and its characteristics. The largest was no more than 3” in length. I think my brothers and sister accumulated most of the birds, but I had one, a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. I hadn’t thought about those birds for more than 50 years, but the memory of them came flooding back when viewing The Secret Birds, an exhibition of work by Chicago Artist Tony Fitzpatrick at the DePaul Art Museum.

The show includes Fitzpatrick’s fantastically-imagined tableaux, drawn collages of birds, that are constructed with words, imagery, and twentieth century ephemera, much of it from Chicago.  The birds are soothsayers and harbingers, saints and sinners, provocateurs and teachers. They pay homage and they reflect. They seem to occupy that same but different magical space imagined in the work of Joseph Cornell.

The Secret Birds brought so many memories to mind – of my late parents, my childhood, books, poetry, and the city. They do not however evoke any sanitized and nostalgic desire for things past. Instead, they create a longing, a mourning for the city I now know Chicago will never become.

The Secret Birds is open at the DePaul Art Museum, 935 W Fullerton, Chicago, IL 60614, though August 21, 2016.  The accompanying publication Is available through Curbside Splendor Publishing.

S.O.S.

For 22 years, Woman Made Gallery has supported the work of woman-identified artists through exhibitions and professional development opportunities. Exhibitions at the gallery address not only feminist issues, but also those critical questions we all encounter every day –­ gender, race, the environment and economic inequality. The gallery also serves the public, celebrating women, community and Chicago in a meaningful and thoughtful way. The most recent exhibition, ABANDONED MARGINS: POLICING THE BLACK FEMALE BODY, received national attention.

Woman Made has been profoundly and negatively impacted by the Illinois Budget crisis. Grants that have historically provided organizational support have evaporated. An organization that has, for more than two decades, employed, supported and educated members of our community, is struggling financially.

You can help Woman Made Gallery survive. Your membership and/or charitable contribution will insure the gallery’s future – no monetary contribution is too small. Let’s not lose this important pillar of Chicago’s cultural edifice. And don’t forget! After making your contribution, plan a visit to the gallery to enjoy and learn from the important work that will be shared in upcoming exhibitions and literary events.

look homeward angel

I have a recurring dream in which I visit the house I grew up in. In my dream I am aware that the house has been abandoned. I am also aware of the weather. It is one of those bright, yet completely overcast days. There is no discernible temperature, neither hot nor cold. All of the doors and windows are wide open and the strong breeze causes the curtains to billow inside. Each time, I enter through the garage and progress through the laundry-room, kitchen and breakfast-room. In the den, my dog is sitting waiting for me. It is as though she has been waiting alone since I left this house, twenty-seven years ago. There the dream always ends.

In reality, I recently returned to my hometown for the first time in several years. I will be living here as an artist-in-residence for two weeks. The town is a wealthy suburb north of Chicago. My husband calls it Magic Town. The wealth has grown exponentially since I lived here. The town manages to be both manicured and wild. It smells good, the streets are lit with gas lamps, and the BP station still has full-service. This is the land of milk and honey, the land of the one percent.

I took advantage of a few free hours and drove down memory lane. Because I lived here from age twelve through twenty-two, I experienced many “firsts” here: my first boyfriend, my first cigarette, my first show and my first awareness that there was a big, nasty, gorgeous and painful world beyond these rarefied lanes.

I drove to my old college, whose demolition and residential re-development had been halted by the financial crisis. I didn’t realize that the old main building was still standing. At one time it appeared learned and grand. Now it’s a structural Miss Havisham, the haunted spinster waiting for the wedding that will never take place. This school is one of the lynchpins in my foundation as an artist. It broke my heart to see it sitting so forlorn, so I quickly moved on to the house my father built. While en route, I paused at the corner of Ridge and Old Mill, where I recalled barfing all over the dashboard only a few blocks from home (an ominous warning I failed to heed). But seeing the house lifted my spirits. It is obviously well cared for. I could not believe how giant the Maples had grown, showing off the season in full color.

 

It’s not strange that Thomas Wolfe named two of his most important works conversely: Look Homeward Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again. I agree that you can’t go home again. If you think you can, you probably never left. But you can look homeward. Yes, I am an artist who has very different sensibilities today. But once-upon-a-time, before I knew any better, I was a debutante and a sorority girl who hung out at the country club and drank too much. All of that is as much a part of me today as critical theory and oil paint are. I’m proud that I know which fork to use and that I will never wear white shoes after Labor Day.

If I had the means to live here, it's unlikely that I would. Frankly, the locals would proably be relieved! It took me so long and was such hard work to get to where I am. Yes, the wealth, beauty and comfort would be lovely, but that kind of paper could certainly afford a pretty nifty little place in France. Besides, I’m still trying to embrace a future that is uncertain and waiting for me. Just like Cleo always is in my dream.

visual disturbance

My husband is a musician and composer. He is sonically circuited. We travelled recently and audio problems developed with the in-flight film. It almost sent him over the edge. Static and poor reception on the car radio elicit a similar response. I sympathize with his reaction, although my sensitivity lies in the visual realm. It has from an early age. I hated when friends would decorate their doors with stickers. It ruined the visual plane of the door. I also hate adhesive price tags placed on package labels.

This sensitivity doesn’t have anything to do with style, ornament, sparseness or excess. It has nothing to do with age or newness, beauty, ugliness, mess or cleanliness. Rather, it is activated when a particular element, combination of elements, or placements of elements are so discordant, one’s visual experience of a thing or place is subverted. I can’t get around it.

Disparate elements are often successfully employed when humor, satire, irony and parody are intended. I’m not referencing those occasions. I’m concerned with the visual disregard for place, time, context and participant. It’s carelessness that occurs in everyday life and in art making. Consider white-flocked Christmas trees in Florida, a photorealist painting executed in Day-Glo colors, a nude wearing spectacles. I could go on and on.

Of course this is strictly a personal problem, but a problem that has served me well when determining the “doneness” of my own work. Often, my first idea for a painting was not my best and this is the place where fault in the overall conception shows up. If my eyes consistently travel to one place in a painting, there is something wrong. In fact, right now I’m thinking of cutting a particular painting into two pieces.

While it can be personally heartbreaking, it raises the bar on work that still needs to be done. If I want to grow, I have to maintain a certain level of dissatisfaction.  Right now I am good, but I want to be better.

opening tonight

that niggling feeling

In recent weeks, a lot of artists have been thinking about and discussing the late David Wojnarowicz and the Smithsonian Institution’s decision to remove his video “Fire in My Belly” from  "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture." Hide/Seek is the current exhibition of gay portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

As an artist and an American, I am mortified by the removal of the work that came in response to the protests of a small conservative Catholic organization and certain members of Congress. The decision is, in effect, censorship that violates any notion of the separation of church and state; that denies the value of individual vision and opinion; and that refuses to acknowledge that those offended by the work may not at all understand it.

Frankly, I don’t think the removal of the work has anything to do with God. I have a niggling feeling that it comes from money and fear. The fear that someone could be questioning another’s faith and that that question will cause the fearful to stop giving money. What a lack of faith indeed.

As a Catholic, I am deeply saddened by the move. If you have read any of Wojnarowicz’s biography, it is obvious that he was disenfranchised his entire life. Given the cultural response to and paralyzing fear around AIDS in the late 1980’s, his diagnosis could only have exacerbated his anger and disillusionment.  As a Catholic, I also believe that God is love and loves the angry, doubtful and disillusioned most. In the garden, even Christ questioned his Father.

Thus, I also must believe that God loves those that demanded the removal of the work. By imposing their desire that the work be removed, they are certainly demonstrating their own doubt. Emerson said, “The faith that stands on authority is not faith.” [1] My hope is that these individuals could open themselves up to that which they are so afraid of.

My own experience has taught me that my deepest hours of doubt are often followed by profound experiences of faith and in those moments of faith I am most open to the emotions, thoughts and ideas of others. Museums and galleries across the country are now showing the video and it is widely available on the Internet. The funny thing is that, thanks to the censorship, “Fire in My Belly” has now been seen by hundreds of thousands of people that never would have travelled to the exhibit in the first place.

God is good.

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[1] Emerson, Essays -First Series

the thingliness of things

During the past month I volunteered at the previously discussed Art Loop Open. On Friday a couple of fresh, young journalism students interviewed me based on my role as a participating artist. The interview was not planned and I had to think fast on my feet to respond to their questions.

Of course, there was the usual question, ”How has the experience of participating in this event been valuable?”  I responded that I had not encountered any of the benefits that can be analyzed with metrics valued in the marketing community. There had been no increased traffic to my website, nor any inquiries about my work. What had occurred was the opportunity to meet and interact with some remarkably talented, smart people. Having moved home from New York in June, I have been missing “my tribe”. Now, I am starting to assemble one, and for that I am extremely grateful.

Next, one of the students asked about the value of art in public spaces and the justification of installing that art with taxpayer dollars. To the first part of the question, I believe that publicly installed art allows people to view it in a familiar environment. Many people outside the cultural sphere like art, but are intimidated by the rarified air of commercial galleries and/or the expense of museum attendance. Encountering art “out in the world” demystifies it and enhances our rather mundane, day-to-day experiences.

As for the taxpayer dollars, every day I hear individuals bemoaning the fact that all manufacturing jobs have gone overseas. Certainly, not in the arts. Consider the Creative Economy. It includes advertising, architecture, art, crafts, design, fashion, film, music, performing arts, publishing, R&D, software, toys and games, TV and radio, and video games. Adjacent to the Creative Economy exists the Cultural Economy. It’s composed of cultural tourism and heritage, museums and libraries, sports and outdoor activities.

The creative process is one of intellectual and material problem solving: How can I make something that successfully conveys an idea or enhances day-to-day life. It is also one of the few generators of manufactured goods made in the United States. As a painter, I make things. The materials I buy to make these things are purchased at local hardware and art supply stores. Most of the materials I purchase are made in the United States. When I advertise or publish information about my work, the materials are printed in the United States. When the objects I manufacture are sold, they are sold by an organization that employs people in the United States. And I am just one painter.

All of this is food for thought as government is repeatedly asked to stop spending in the arts and schools drop arts education. It has been demonstrated that students exposed to music early on, develop acuity for math and science. We spend millions of dollars creating young business people, only to send them to so-called creative workshops once they are employed. That stupid, overused catchphrase, Think Outside the Box keeps reverberating. The only box that exists is one that we have, as a society, built.

Artists are not a curiosity. Perhaps we can adjust our thinking and see the value in our creative community. Perhaps we can understand the investment in it. Perhaps the MFA is the new MBA. After all, look at where those MBAs …forget it.

As to that new political faction causing so many problems, remember, somebody designed that tea bag.

Interesting sources:

Huffington Post

Unesco: Singapore

Otis College of Art & Design

top eleven

The end of the year, and surely the end of the decade, brings about a plethora of obligatory “Top Ten” lists. Why not dive right in? Below is my Aesthetic Top Eleven list for 2009 – in alphabetical not preferential order.

Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. On exhibit are more than three hundred drawings from this vast collection. Included are gestural, figurative, conceptual and systems based works. One gets to view drawings of established masters such as Donald Judd and Joseph Beuys, while viewing contemporary European works by Kai Althoff, Neo Rausch and Francis Alÿs. There was almost too much to take in and the show required more than one visit. The collection demonstrates why drawings, both as tools and end products, remain relevant.

Fred Sandback at David Zwirner, deftly demonstrated the late artist’s acute sense of the phenomenology of space and volume. The illusion of these qualities was remarkably created with the lowliest of materials, and its most minimal employment: acrylic yarn.

Martin Kippenberger, The Problem Perspective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Kippenberger lived fast and hard and died young from liver cancer at the age of 44. This did not however, diminish his prolific, varied and fearless output. I walked away with the sense that I shouldn’t think too much about what I am doing, but rather “do” and let the thinking follow.

Mat Lombardi, Guitar Quartets. My only non-visual entry and please forgive the nepotism. I felt that I was hearing something I shouldn’t hear; experiencing something beyond my realm; and knowing something a human shouldn’t know. Profound.

Michaël Borremans, Taking Turns at David Zwirner, New York. The Europeans aren’t afraid of employing representational and figurative art to describe an ambiguity. Borremans does just that. I respond to his paint and his iconography.

Pierre Bonnard, The Late Interiors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Every experienced painter that I’ve recently heard speak has referenced Bonnard. I can understand why. His ability to meld color, light, form, material, abstraction, figuration and symbolism was astounding. I wanted to lick the paint right off of the canvases.

Raoul De Keyser , Terminus: Drawings (1979-1982) and Recent Paintings at David Zwirner the small and modest abstract paintings made clear that the artist was definitely looking at or thinking of something when he painted them. The beautifully installed show was refreshing amidst the spectacle that is the first opening night of the autumn season in Chelsea.

Ree Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning World at The Drawing Center, New York. Avoiding the tropes so typically found in the works of many of her fellow feminist contemporaries, Morton’s work remains fresh today more than thirty years after her death. It demonstrates that she was part of this world, not just commenting on it.

Robert Frank, The Americans at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It articulated the way I think and changed the way I see.

Song Dong, Projects 90 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. If you have suffered the loss of one parent and observed the grief of the surviving one, this installation, based on the Chinese concept of wu jin qi yong, or "waste not” consists of the complete contents of Dong’s mother’s home, amassed over fifty years. The artist collaborated with her, assembling and organizing the contents after his father’s death. It poignantly demonstrated all of the sadness, humor, impatience, compassion and lunacy that punctuate such an experience.

The Lindy & Edwin Bergman Collection of Joseph Cornell’s boxes at the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago. Finally, one can regularly view the important and comprehensive collection of 38 boxes, where, within each, dreams are made manifest.

november

"Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate." W.H. Auden

I like November. It appeals to my senses; the smell of fallen, damp leaves - and when you’re lucky - the smell of burning leaves; the gray and silvery skies; the earth preparing itself for a long winter’s nap.

The primary reason I like November is that it is the month in which I met Mat, twenty-five years ago. I have known him for more than half my life. The funny thing is that the last 14 1/2 months feel infinitely longer than the span of 25. We’re on the home stretch now and waiting patiently to begin our next chapter is difficult. Whatever or wherever it is we’re agreed, it will be together.

We like sparrows. We call them the jesters of the bird world. We give them suet and seeds in the winter and sneak crumbs to them when dining outdoors. Last summer, Mat half-jokingly said, “I think you should paint a giant sparrow”, and because I take him far more seriously than even my painting, I did.

A Marriage, 2009, oil on linen, 30”x 40”

perfect

Last weekend on my trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I had the opportunity to see what may be a perfect painting, Johannes Vermeer’s The Milkmaid. Only thirty-four paintings are “officially” attributed to the artist, so I make it point to see one if I am in a city so fortunate to own one. The Met has five of its own works by Vermeer. Of course it does. They own a possible sixth but its provenance remains in question. The Milkmaid is on brief loan from the Rijksmuseumin, its home in the Netherlands.

What is it about this painting (and others by Vermeer) that demands respect from historians and artists of every discipline? The first aspect perceived in a Vermeer is the quality of light. Many attribute this to his possible use of the camera obscura which caused a halo effect when drawing the projected image onto the support. As a painter, I know how hard it is to effectively translate a drawing into a painting, and although the device may have assisted Vermeer in the composition, it would not have produced the optical effects his paint creates. That comes in the application.

Vermeer’s paint is luminous, and the light is projected from within the layers of pigment, not the surface. Of course, the pigments, particularly the lead-based ones used, assist in producing the layers of paint that independently project their characteristics. Yes, lead-based white, or Flake White, is still the best white and with care can be used safely. Vermeer worked with a very limited palette. Unlike the commercially produced paints available today, the chemical composition and reactivity of his paints varied color to color. Thus, it is believed, each area had to be applied and then allowed to dry before the application of a different color. Thus the blue in the skirt of the milkmaid maintains a mind-boggling brilliance.

It is obvious that every inch of the painting was given equal importance. So much so that even a dent in the white plaster wall behind the subject is as fascinating as the bread on the table. This is a consistent quality found in master paintings executed centuries later; consider the work of Cezanne, Matisse and Pollock. Finally, the milkmaid herself is given the dignity and presence of a person of much higher social standing. This may be the most enduring, and radical, characteristic of the work.

I like to think of this painting as an execution in extravagant simplicity. The Milkmaid's continued relevance lies in the attention given in equal parts, to every aspect of the work; conception, composition, materials, care and execution. Had there not been a crowd, I could have lingered, gazing at it for hours.

At the Still Point of the Turning World: Ree Morton at the Drawing Center

Ree Morton, Untitled (Repetition Series), 1970. Pencil on paper, 14 x 10 inches. Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York and Annemarie Verna Galerie, Zürich.

Ree Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning World currently on view at The Drawing Center, offers a glimpse into the drawing practice of the late artist better known for her influential sculpture and installations.

Though sculpture is included in the exhibition, one might fail to notice the larger, three-dimensional forms. Those who do might experience a measure of irritation over these work’s more heavy-handed intrusion into the lyrical, modest and highly personal drawings that span the length of the artist’s all-too-short career.

Made more than 30 years ago, Morton’s work is unusually refreshing and current, lacking the “looking for Mr. Goodbar” aesthetic that dates the work of some of her feminist contemporaries. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Morton had already exorcised much of the baggage associated with feminist art of the 1970’s. Having married, raised children and then divorced in order to completely engage in her art making practice, Morton was able to incorporate these experiences into the broader pool of dream, spontaneity, myth and poetry.

In addition, Morton demonstrated an ease and faculty with materials at hand, freeing her from any sort of material carbon dating and allowing her obviously rich imagination to roam freely through her work. In works such as her series of Untitled Line Drawings, 1970, one is reminded that a static line on paper can demonstrate tension, temperament, movement and space. Though heavily influenced by the drawings of Eva Hesse, Morton’s drawings possess a far more organic and ephemeral presence than structural one.

Morton’s line quality and spare execution reveal with simplicity and candor, the benefit of making drawings discreet from preparatory practice and an artist’s principal project. Her works also fortify the notion that the stuff of inspiration is not limited to spectacle and conflict, but can still germinate within the antiquated realms of music, nature, myth, literature and dreams.

the death of painting, and the death of painting

I find myself pondering this statement-turned-question often. I also find myself saying, “I am just a painter.”

Certainly, as a documentary or didactic vehicle, painting’s usefulness was replaced long ago by the speed and accuracy of the photograph. Yet, like classical painting, photography cannot always escape the actuality of the subject matter captured.

Video, and sometimes performance, can provoke profound emotional, visceral and intellectual experiences. Video in particular, can compete with and satisfy the desire created by the insistent mass-media culture in which we exist. Yet the experience of video and performance is often ephemeral. For those seeking beauty, the methods can render the viewer bereft. A return viewing may offer nothing to enhance the experience.

Painting has the alchemy and the voodoo. Representational or abstract, painting can effect those same intense experiences. It has done so for thousands of years, with the same humble material, pigment suspended in liquid. The stuff, applied with intuition and practice, is bolstered conversely by imagination and lived experience.

The alchemy is often the hook that turns a visual into a painter. It is a heady, sensuous mixture of plasticity and color. It incorporates smell, movement and texture. It is the satisfaction derived from transforming the infinite into the particular and the pleasure of making something from nothing. For the painter, the alchemy is the love potion.

The voodoo is the realization. Rembrandt never met the Prodigal Son, yet he painted his return with acute insight and sensitivity. When I saw the work, I recalled every grace granted and found myself crying in the middle of the Hermitage.

In contrast, the modest, abstract paintings of Raoul De Keyser (currently on exhibit at David Zwirner) negotiate the gap between object and space and explore the tension amid color and form. While they talk about their paint, these paintings also materialize an aesthetic very different than the jam-packed, monumental canvases symptomatic of a recent, more conspicuous time.

In its innumerable forms, painting remains relevant. Perhaps it’s wise. It has the capacity to simultaneously reinvent and reflect upon itself.

Last night I visited Chelsea for the opening of the Fall Season. There was a lot to take in. I encountered and admired examples of those other forms, but I sought and contemplated the paintings. Dead? At least for the painters, not yet.

(photo: the floor in my colleague Russell Tyler’s studio)

josh garrett

Chicago artist and musician Josh Garrett consistently seeks perfection in his work and in the world around him. He does so with the conviction that ultimately, perfection is the sole purview of God. Josh’s work represents his earnest effort to understand God’s will in his life.

His current body of work, Providence I, is executed in his preferred materials of pigment, fire and metal. It addresses the age-old conflict between God’s will and man’s will, and does so with minimal description or narrative. Despite his emblematic iconography and the aggression implied by the materials he employs, the works are elegant and highly personal.

Josh’s work is currently on exhibit at Ossia Fine Art Space, 410 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago. The exhibit runs through September 25, 2009.

Ruined

The personal compromises and self-delusions a group of Congolese brothel women are willing to employ to guarantee survival in the face of atrocity and genocide is the core theme of Lynn Nottage’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize winning drama Ruined, produced by the Manhattan Theater Club, and being performed at Stage I at the Manhattan City Center. The play is co-produced by the Goodman Theater in Chicago where it premiered in 2008.

The Manhattan Theater Club, one of the nation’s premiere not-for-profit theater producers, has provided theatergoers with contemporary dramas, musicals and comedies since its inception in 1971. The Club incorporates three theater venues: on Broadway, The Samuel J. Friedman Theater (formerly the Biltmore Theater;) and Stage I and Sage II Theatres off-Broadway at the Manhattan City Center. Ruined is the sixth Pulitzer Prize winning Drama the club has produced.

Travels to the refuge camps of Uganda, and the 1939 work Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht inform Nottage’s work. Initially, Nottage planned an adaptation of Brecht’s play, but her own experience interviewing Congolese women in Rwandan refugee camps prompted her own work. Unlike Brecht, the Brooklyn born, Cornell/Yale educated Nottage seeks to evoke an emotional response from the audience, rather than (in the case of Brecht) an intellectual one. “I believe in engaging people emotionally, because I think they react more out of emotion” than when they are “preached to, told how to feel. It was important that this not become a documentary, or agitprop”.[1] Nottage’s plays frequently pivot on the experience of women, and here, the brutalities they have suffered civil war-torn Africa. Indeed the title references women, who have experienced rape, sexual abuse and mutilation so brutal that that they are ruined physically, emotionally and culturally.

The play opens in the barroom of Mama Nadi’s brothel with Christian, a local customer and “supplier” delivering goods to Mama Nadi (the July 28^th performance featured understudy Jamie Lincoln Smith in the role of Simon.) Along with cigarettes, liquor and various sundries, Simon, a tea-totaller, supplies fresh women for the brothel. On this particular visit, he delivers Salima (Quincy Tyler Bernstein), a simple minded woman who has been rejected by her family and village as the result of her kidnapping and subsequent servicing of a band of rebels in the bush, and Sophie (Condola Rashad), a girl of eighteen, who has been ruined. The flamboyant, emotionally detached Mama Nadi (Portia) at first refuses to take on Sophie – it’s bad for business - but agrees after Simon begs, praises Sophie’s talent for song and reveals that Sophie is his niece. He also bribes Mama Nadi with Belgian chocolates.

It is clear from the get-go that Mama Nadi plays both sides of the civil war fence and is interested in one thing, self-preservation. Mama Nadi has convinced herself and almost convinces the audience, that her prostitution of these women provides safe haven from the indecencies and rejection that they have already suffered. In addition, her ownership of the brothel represents her independence, from the brutalities of war and from Simon’s genuine romantic advances.

As the drama progresses the warring factions draw nearer the brothel and tensions mount. Christian begins drinking, the customers become more raucous. In addition, the audience gradually learns the stories of both the now pregnant Salima and another prostitute, Josephina (Victoire Charles), a tribal Chief’s daughter who has been dehumanized by similar atrocities as well as rejected from her village. Given her emotional simplicity, Salima’s story is particularly heartbreaking. Although the title references her, we never do hear Sophie’s story. What the audience begins to understand is that all of these women are the victims of Congolese Civil War. In the end, each, even the apparently hard-hearted, mercenary Mama Nadi, though damaged, have not been destroyed by the conflict. It is their courage that enables their survival.

Additional characters, all male, include rebel leader Jerome Kisimbe (Chris Chalk); Commander Osembenga (Kevin Mambo); mercenary Mr. Harari (Tim Mardirosian); and Salima’s repentant husband Pascal (Ron McBee).

In a drama, where men could easily be seen as only as monstrous perpetrators of evil and women as spiritless victims, Director Kate Whoriskey, effectively draws out the subtle personality traits of each of the characters. She evokes sympathy and distain for almost all involved. Having previously directed another of Nottage’s works, Intimate Apparel, Whoriskey carefully balances the push-pull, intense emotions that the dramatist has penned. Here, almost everyone is a victim, either of the atrocities of war, or the Western Colonialism that left countries such as the Congo bereft.

Stand out performances culled by Whoriskey include the deceptively complex Salima, enacted by the aforementioned Quincy Tyler Bernstein; the delusional Mama Nadi, flamboyantly portrayed by Portia; and the sympathetic, sweetly voiced, yet spirited, Sophie as rendered by New York newcomer Condola Rashad. Rashad premièred the role at the Goodman Theater. Among the men, Jaime Lincoln Smith as Simon, reveals helplessness and fear in the face of the anticipated horrors. Initially, it was difficult to hear and understand Smith as Simon. But he quickly recovered his voice either as the result of his own confidence or an adjustment in the sound system. Indeed, despite the efforts of dialect coach Charlotte Fleck, all of the actors seemed, at times, to struggle with maintaining their accent. Of final note is Kevin Mambo’s Commander Osembenga, the character most closely identified with the senselessness and evil of war, and the ego and bravado necessary to justify its leadership and proliferation.

The set, designed by Derek McLane, transitions between the barroom and the shared living quarters of Salima, Josephina and Sophie. Though it incorporates cheerful local color, it still conveys the poverty of the situation and the isolation within the density of the surrounding rain forest. Costumes designed by Paul Tazewell suggest the same local color while reflecting the rag-tag collection of characters living at Mama Nadi’s. Finally, the entire production is punctuated by music composed by Dominic Kanza with lyrics written by Nottage. Performed by Congolese guitarist Simon Shabantu Kashama and sung by members of the cast, the music transitions the narrative, and reflects the tradition of oral history and story telling indigenous to many African countries.

Ruined is a powerful drama that evokes complex emotions regarding the nature of survival, the power of evil, the evil of power and the uselessness of cultural judgments cast upon those incapable of defending themselves. What Lynn Nottage has so successfully written and the Manhattan Theater Club so powerfully staged is the experienced collapse and inevitable triumph of the human spirit in the face unimaginable evil. With so many spectacles, theatrical interpretations of animated feature films, and resuscitations of past productions populating the current theater scene in New York, it is edifying to leave a play a little sadder, a little more informed, and certainly asking a lot more questions.

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[1] New York Times By Celia McGee, “Approaching Brecht, by Way of Africa,” New York Times: January 21, 2009,