Inana may be a world premiere, but it's no world-class play

A A A Comments (3) By Juliet Wittman Thursday, Jan 29 2009

Mahira Kakkar plays a young Iraqi woman in the Denver Center's Inana.

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Presented by the Denver Center Theatre Company through February 28, Ricketson Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex, 303-893-4100, www.denvercenter.org.

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Inana is set in a shabby London hotel room, where the director of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, having done all he could to secure the treasures in his care, has fled with the bride he acquired through an arrangement with her father, a young woman he barely knows. The action starts and ends before the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the much-publicized looting of the museum; we have since learned that while thousands of pieces are still missing, many others have been found or returned, although the pillaging of valuable archeological sites continues throughout the country.

While watching this world premiere, I had a hard time suspending disbelief. I didn't believe playwright Michele Lowe truly understood what it meant to be a contemporary Iraqi; I didn't believe the twists and turns of her plot; most important, I plain didn't believe that the people I saw on stage were real people. Although Piter Marek's intelligent performance makes the protagonist, Darius Shalid, somewhat convincing as a learned and dignified lover of antiquities, Darius's relationship with Shali, his wife, is baffling — and Lowe's device of providing reams of necessary exposition by having him give an endless, pleading monologue while she sits behind the closed door of the bathroom doesn't help. Actress Mahira Kakkar gives Shali the same look of wide-eyed surprise almost throughout, along with a curved and melodious intonation that makes every sentence sound like a question. Shali is less a person than a pastiche of all the images and ideas we have in this culture about Middle Eastern women. She's a timid creature from a rural village who's afraid to be left alone — but she's also a smart, spunky girl who put herself in danger by teaching other girls to read. She, personally, was one of the many female victims of the murderous Uday Hussein. She's the metaphorical incarnation of a goddess of both war and sex, and her union with Darius will teach him to broaden his antiquarian passions and understand that living human beings should be as fiercely cherished as ancient objects. You feel as if other stories are nudging at the text, from that of Scheherazade to Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran; when the goddess Inana is mentioned, you hear a low, portentous sound and half expect Indiana Jones to show up.

It's not that a lot of terrible things didn't happen to women — and, of course, to the entire population — under Saddam Hussein (although until the sanction years began in 1991, Iraqi women were among the most educated in the Middle East). What strains credulity is the idea that all these things would have happened to one woman, and that similar suffering has been visited on just about every other character seen or mentioned in Inana.

Even the smaller details are jarring. Why would someone as educated as Darius be confused by English food? Does he really believe there's nowhere to go in London on a Sunday night — including a thousand Arab restaurants — or is he lying to Shali? Set designer Vicki Smith has delivered the perfect replica of a London hotel room that's remained unchanged since the 1950s, and the light at the window, created by Ann G. Wrightson, is so authentic that it made me homesick. But what English waiter — no matter how eccentric — would barge into a hotel room tossing out words like "huzzah" and "smashing," and say "fuck" in front of a distinguished guest?

There are some mildly charming, poetic set pieces here about shades of color, and the big emotional scene at the end almost pays off. But watching this static play, I couldn't help thinking about the spiky, eccentric, highly individualized Iraqi women — from a sex-obsessed painter to an elderly exile to a little girl who inadvertently betrayed her father — of Heather Raffo's one-woman play, 9 Parts of Desire, and of the vitality of actress Karen Slack's portrayal of them in last season's Curious Theatre production. Lowe did a lot of research for Inana. What's missing is the imagination that brings fictive characters to life.

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Amy 05/11/2009 3:59:00 AM

I was fortunate to see Inana on its last night, at Ricketson Theater. My 21 and 18 year old son and daughter saw it too. We LOVED the play. It was exciting, interesting, had great characterizations and dialogue. Contrary to the review and the first letter which didn't find it edgy enough, I thought the characters were developed, and the events in their lives plausible. At any rate, Michele Lowe's vision was to write a play about stolen art, in this case art which would have been plundered by thieves seeking the moment no one would notice them, during the pending invasion of Iraq. I enjoyed the twists and turns of the story. The waiter (a humorously foul-mouthed soccer fanatic) was pure comic relief. Remember, too, these scenes are NOT in a better hotel. I found Mark's comment (the first one) to be rather typically bigoted: "The play was written by a non-arab woman aesthete who appears to get most of her material from books and such." One shouldn't hold the nationality of the playwright against her. I appreciated this accessible drama about contemporary Iraq, and as far as I could tell, so did the rest of the audience, which applauded enthusiastically. I'm glad we - the non-edgy, non-elite people of flyover country - had the opportunity to see Inana.
Amy Bittner 03/05/2009 8:25:00 PM

Inana was wonderfully written, thoughtful performed and an experience to watch. I disagree with both this article and the one comment posted. I have never been so moved by an evening at the theater. Hats off to Michele Lowe and the cast.
mark ajluni 02/09/2009 8:31:00 AM

I concur wholeheartedly with this review. I saw this play over the weekend, and I must say I was sorely disappointed. I had high hopes that Americans might finally get an Iraqi perspective on our invasion and destruction, I mean liberation, of their country. And while it is some comfort to see Arabs being portrayed as human beings, a rare event in film and stage performances, this play has almost nothing to say about Iraqis or Middle Easterners in general beyond very stereotypical comedic caricatures we've all heard before: Arab fathers like their daughters to get married, Arabs talk a little funny, Arabs woman are very modest, ect...Yet the light weight superficiality of these characterizations is just one of my concerns. The politics of this play are incredibly tangential to actual concerns of Iraqis and Arabs in general. Moreover, the author confuses the secular politics of Saddam's Bathe party with those of religious fundamentalists who might chastise a woman for not wearing hijab. Perhaps, the setting in the Shia city of Mosul could explain this confusion, but it certainly conflates such vital distinctions, hardening the ignorance of those who prefer broad brush strokes for the whole of the Middle East. In fact, it is only now, after the U.S. invasion, that religious fundamentalism has set back woman's rights in Iraqi so demonstrably. The plot follows the story of an obsessive museum curator who frets over his favorite statue and marries a girl with a deep dark secret. Through flashbacks, the only time you get to leave the London hotel room, the plot is revealed; a plot that if told linearly would seen as an well-worn trope with a bit of the freak, as protagonist, thrown in for good measure. I think these "modern" authors of mediocre talent often obscure their lame storyline with such confusions and little details that sneak out here and there masking as suspense. Ooh. Artistic merits aside, or lack thereof, I'm amazed that here we find all the typical villains-Saddam Hussein and his sons, religious zealots, torture chambers, severed limbs, and all manner of backwards oppression. On no occasion do we see the slightest glimpse of the destruction wrought by the American Invasion of Iraq in play that pretends to cover this from an Iraqi perspective. Only the crimes of Bad Arabs against good Arabs. I find this unconscionable. The play was written by a non-arab woman aesthete who appears to get most of her material from books and such. No big shock then that she might get all juiced up on bizarre eccentric pseudo-history and art lovers, i.e, her people in dessert tones. What is shocking though is that Denver Center is trying to pass this off as some edgy work of progress. It's not, just a slightly stylized version of the same old song and dance.