Heather Raffo

This new edition of Nine Parts of Desire includes a CD that is an elegantly enhanced audio version of the play with the full text performed by Heather Raffo. It features original music by both Iraqi and American musicians—Sahar Taha, Vocals, Omar Bashir on Oud, Amir ElSaffar on Santur, Johnny Farraj on Riq/Tambourine/Mazhar/Frame Drum—including Sahar Taha's beautiful recording of "Che Mali Wali" from her album Baghdadiyat and "Flesh," an original song by Amy Raasch.

"The voices are a study in contrasts: vivid and subdued, sophisticated and naive, seductive and standoffish. But they cohere to form a powerful collective portrait of suffering and endurance in Nine Parts of Desire, Heather Raffo’s impassioned theatrical documentary about the lives of contemporary Iraqi women."--Charles Isherwood, New York Times

"An example of how art can remake the world and eloquently name pain. . . the play brings news of the psychic life of the brutalized and allows us to think about the unthinkable."--John Lahr, The New Yorker

"Heather Raffo. . .brings us closer to the inner life of Iraq than a thousand slick-surfaced TV reports. Yet her beautifully shaped one-woman play is a play, not a stodgily earnest piece of documentary theater, and therein lies its singular force. . ." --Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal