Jenny Jules in Arena’s “Ruined”Ruined is a play for those who want some real good laughs with their moral outrage or vice versa. The show is twice as funny as it would otherwise have been, precisely because it is set in dark times, and twice as painful because the characters making us laugh one moment are suffering not too long after. This Pulitzer-prize winning drama by Lynn Nottage is being given a raucous and affecting realization at Arena Stage.
Set in the round by director Charles Randolph-Wright, the play emphasizes community — the community of the audience sitting on all four sides of Alexander V. Nichols’ colorful pool hall set, and the fractured community surrounding that pool hall in the Congo during the Second Congo War. From 1998 through its official (but ineffective) ending in 2003, the war claimed more lives than any conflict since World War II. Nottage traveled to the Congo to find out about the toll the war had taken on women, and the result was this play.
The poolhall — which is also a brothel — is the domain of Mama Nadi (Jenny Jules), an indomitable, hilarious and complicated mistress who balances her life, and the lives of her girls, on the knife-edge of apolitical commerce: she caters just as happily to the rebel forces as to the government’s army. Her supplier and admirer “Professor” Christian (Jeremiah W. Birkett) comes one day bearing Belgian chocolates and three young women rescued from the repeated rapes of the militaries. Mama Nadi cannot take them all without risking the lives of those already under her roof, so she buys just one, Sophie (Rachel Holmes), but ends up with two anyways, the second being Salima (Donnetta Lavinia Grays). When Mama Nadi finds out Sophie is “ruined” — torn up so much by rape that she has trouble walking — she almost throws her out, but ends up keeping her either because she truly has a soft heart or because Sophie is both a good accountant and singer.
And so life continues in Mama Nadi’s establishment: dancing and flirting with soldiers, Sophie singing with the live four-piece band (led by guitarist/music director Mongezi Chris Ntaka), Mama Nadi’s constant attempts to keep both factions happily trading their cash for sex and beer, and quarrels between Salima, Sophie and number one girl Josephine (Jamairais Malone), who is convinced that European prospector Mr. Harari (Lawrence Redmond) will take her away. But of course, this delicate balance cannot be maintained forever; eventually it becomes impossible for Mama Nadi to keep telling both rebels and government that she’s on their side, and to keep her girls safe from rape while they sell their bodies.
Every person involved in this production is doing nigh-perfect work. With the exception of a confusing moment of blocking at the climax when what’s going on should have been more understandable (at least from the southwest seats), Randolph-Wright and the performers do a masterful job keeping the action open to all four audience sides. Jules is a wildly expressive and sharp-tongued force of nature as Mama Nadi, impossible to pin down yet believable every moment. No one could ask for this play to be done any better, so the only question is whether the play itself is something a playgoer wants to see.
To that end, it is instructive that Nottage makes a tough choice at the play’s end; just as soon as the simmering conflicts come to a boil, she pulls back from the darkness to offer a final scene that, while tense, offers hope. This is what, perhaps, makes Ruined so unique and what really earned it its Pulitzer — for while there are many plays which bleakly depict the tragedies and injustices of the contemporary world, there are few, if any, that fearlessly show that there is joy and hope even amidst the injustices — and so something to really fight for. Thus, what the play may lose in having a fairly foreseeable plot, it makes up for by depicting its characters — the victims, witnesses and perpetrators of horrors — as complex, flawed and often funny human beings.
Ruined runs at Arena Stage through June 5. Tickets are available online.
