Ruined

Kate Whoriskey, the director of the 2008 world premiere of Ruined, writes in her Introduction that she and Lynn Nottage, the playwright, were “compelled by the notion of staging a woman’s complicated relationship to war” (ix), taking inspiration from Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 play Mother Courage and Her Children. Nottage chose to set the action in the Congo, where “[a] violent war over natural resources had been raging” (ix), a war that Nottage felt deserved more than “the lack of interest the international community showed for such a devastating conflict” (x). Together, Nottage and Whoriskey traveled to Uganda and coordinated with Amnesty International in Kampala, so they “could use contacts to set up interviews with Congolese women who had crossed over the border to escape the violence” (x).

The interviews with the women and with other people Nottage and Whoriskey met, like their driver and a lead doctor at a hospital, revealed that “rape is integral part of any war” (x), “a tool to humiliate the women and to degrade the opposing side’s masculinity” (xi), as well as a way to ensure that the women “were left without the ability to produce children” (xi). As well, Nottage and Whoriskey learned that, often, the rapists “were themselves victims of unspeakable violence” (xi). The men and boys participating in the genocide “are so psychologically scarred that from the point of the trauma forward, they spend the rest of their lives terrorising and destroying others” (xi).

Whoriskey links the atrocities in the Congo with “what was done in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay” (xi), specifying that “[i]n the United States, we have the money to create weaponry that removes us from the violence we enact” (xi). In contrast, the impoverished state of the Congo means that “the human body becomes the weapon” (xi) and “a woman’s womb ‘the battleground’” (xi). Upon realizing these truths about the war in the Congo, Nottage decided that she was more interested in telling the story of the lives of Central Africans than writing an adaptation of Mother Courage and Her Children, so she decided to focus on “the full story, the positive alongside the negative” (xii).

Whoriskey credits the women they met in Uganda, most of whom were members of a group called Isis who were “dedicated to documenting the violence against women” (xii) and providing care for communities impacted by the violence. As well, she applauds the efforts of doctors and child-minders looking after orphans, as well as artists and musicians who carry on with their creative pursuits. Whoriskey explains that “[t]he core commitment of Ruinedis to celebrate and examine the spectrum of human life in all its complexities” (xiii) and that theatre “can activate change, heal a bit of the horror, restore hope and give voice to the silent and unseen” (xiii).