The moment Heather Raffo essentially became a playwright arrived a little over two decades ago, when she wrote the first, 20-minute version of what was destined to become her internationally acclaimed work “Nine Parts of Desire.”
And now — with her latest play, “Noura” — Raffo is about to return to the very place where that happened: San Diego, and the Old Globe Theatre.
Raffo was a student in what’s now known as the Old Globe/University of San Diego Shiley Graduate Acting Program in 1998 when she penned that early incarnation of “Nine Parts” to serve as an acting showcase.
At that point, “I never, ever thought I was going to be a creative writer,” Raffo says now. But the experience of visiting Iraq, her father’s homeland, five years earlier “had deeply changed me,” she says. “So by ’98, these personal stories were living inside me. I said, ‘OK, I’m going to write about that.’”
Even after that first dance with “Nine Parts,” though, Raffo didn’t return to the play — which is built around the voices of numerous Iraqi women — for another couple of years. But once the piece was finally produced, it found audiences and acclaim in New York and around the world, winning Raffo a Lucille Lortel Award and other honors.
Now comes “Noura,” which likewise is built around characters of Iraqi heritage, but arrives in a world much-changed from when “Nine Parts” was born.
The play, which is getting its first West Coast production after premiering off-Broadway last year, centers on Iraqi immigrants in America, and in particular on the title character, who was a celebrated architect in her home country but has struggled to find her way in the United States. Meanwhile, the place of her birth has descended into chaos.
Raffo herself played Noura in the New York production; in director Johanna McKeon’s staging for the Old Globe, the character is played by Lameece Issaq. (The Globe cast also includes Giovanni Cozic, Mattico David, Isra Elsalihie and Fajer Kaisi.)
“I will say something quite profound about this cast: There are three Iraqis in it,” Raffo notes by phone from her New York home, adding with a laugh: “That’s dreamy!”
“Not to put too much into it, but one (actor’s) heritage is Iraqi Christian, one is Iraqi Muslim, and one came from being a refugee immigrant. So the story couldn’t be more embodied and lived (in their experience).”
While “Noura” takes some cues from Henrik Ibsen’s theatrical masterwork “A Doll’s House” — with its proto-feminist heroine, Nora Helmer — the play is not meant to be some kind of remake of or sequel to the Ibsen original.
The piece grew out of a narrative-writing workshop Raffo led a few years back in New York, as part of a grant program to help build a demand for theater in the Middle Eastern community there.
In the course of that work, which encouraged participants to tell their own stories, “people who didn’t think they were going to talk suddenly started talking,” says Raffo. “It was, ‘We don’t speak about our taboos’ — and then suddenly it’s a flood of taboos. It was a breakthrough.”
McKeon says “Noura” is destined to surprise any playgoers expecting a conventional look at immigrants: “It certainly subverts expectations on many levels,” says the director, who has deep roots in Middle Eastern-centered theater via New York’s Noor Theatre — co-founded by “Noura” star Issaq, her longtime friend and collaborator.
San Diego County also has a significant Chaldean Christian community, and the plight of Chaldean Christians in Iraq is “one of the heartbreaking things about the show,” McKeon adds.
And for Raffo, the richness of that culture, plus the fact San Diego sits in close proximity to our own country’s ongoing refugee crisis, makes this a fertile place for the play to be staged.
As she says: “It’s going to sit in a wonderful and complicated way.”
by James Herbert
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