Interview: Heather Raffo And Zak Berkman of NINE PARTS at People's Light

Heather Raffo's award-winning play 9 Parts of Desire comes to film as Nine Parts in a new adaptation now streaming through People's Light, a Chester County cultural center. The one-woman performance, which originally debuted in 2003 and ran in London and off-Broadway before touring internationally, features Raffo in the roles of nine Iraqi women exploring love and grief within countries undone by division, violence, and loss.

I sat down for a video call with actor and playwright Heather Raffo and People's Light producing artistic director Zak Berkman to talk about the inspirations and adaptations behind the scenes of Nine Parts as it prepares to celebrate its twentieth birthday.

Responses are edited for brevity and clarity. To ask your own burning questions, be sure to join the Q&A with Raffo hosted by People's Light on February 20th at 7pm Eastern Time.

My first question is about the decision to come back to Nine Parts in film. I'm thinking about the fact that I could watch this in Philadelphia, and my friends across the country can watch it as well, which isn't always an affordance of stage plays. Is that something you considered when choosing to do an adaptation?

ZB: Here we were at the start of the shutdown in 2020, talking about converting our theater into a soundstage and thinking through how to make something that would be really valuable in a digital format. And then I just asked a really simple question, which was "Heather, is there a film of Nine Parts?"

We were aware that some of our audience extends beyond the Philly region. But in the end, People's Light is a theater about Chester County, and it's about reaching an audience that doesn't actually get much access to theater in general because of our region and location. So, we're deeply rooted in the local, but conscious of the national at the same time.

HR: For me it was the excitement of being in people's living rooms ... This was a way that these works, these lines, these characters could really create an impact with communities that might never go to the theater. But then artistically, I was also in just a really different place. I had been carrying the stories of Nine Parts for almost 20 years, and I was excited to reflect and revisit the story itself in a new and different way.

My dad had just passed, and I again was in Michigan and was feeling that the Michigan of 2020 had similarities to what I felt Iraq had gone through. I wanted to see if, in setting Nine Parts in Michigan, I was able to speak to how the American identity had changed as much as to how the play was holding an Iraqi identity from decades ago.

What are some of the changes that found their way into the film that weren't in the play before?

HR: The structure of the play is nine different Iraqi women speaking in monologues, each telling their stories. One of those nine characters is an Iraqi American character. She was always loosely based on me. Her experience in the play, 20 years ago, was that she was watching the war on TV, worrying about her family, praying their names and talking about her connection to the country.

The biggest shift was her experience, because those family names - which were my family names - were all people that were living in Iraq 20 years ago. That was a hundred family members, all living in Baghdad. Now, I have one cousin living in Baghdad.

That's a lot of people that had to flee or find homes somewhere else. And so my sense of having an Iraqi root system now feels like I'm part of a diaspora. And that happened in the last 10 years. Three wars in Iraq happened in my lifetime. A root system of thousands of years of my family is now one cousin. That was what I was holding when I came to Zak and said, "Okay, I'm going to rewrite this character."

The other thing the film needed was a narrative frame. The inspiration for the frame came from imagining what a woman who's grieving in 2020 and can't bury her father because of the lack of being able to gather. She arrives at this church in Flint, Michigan, the oldest Iraqi church in North America, thinking that she's going to enact her own funeral and say her last rights to her dad, and these Iraqi women start coming to her in spirit and ancestry.

Even though that's a completely new narrative, one of the things that feels unique is that it made all the other characters feel like they were inside that Iraqi American woman's head, which is how they feel to me. It's like they're hanging out over my shoulder and whispering in my ear. So it became a very personal, interior version of the play.

How do you bring that kind of intimacy into film? What brings it alive for you in the same way that an audience being in the theater might bring it alive for you?

HR: We always focused on what each character was trying to do to that American character. The director's intention was to highlight, "How are we moving this American character's journey along? How are we trying to reach her even if she isn't in the room, even if one character is in the basement or in the kitchen?" It was always about how we are getting her to speak her truth. As an actor, I thought that was a really beautiful note, and something I could hold and work with.

You mentioned COVID, and how it's not only intertwined with the production of this film at People's Light, but is also present in the play through the inability to gather in order to mourn. Are there any other ways that it's present in the film?

HR: I think maybe in two ways. One is in the isolation we all experience during COVID. You can draw a bunch of analogies to doing a solo show.

Beyond that, there was just this sense that we really are universally connected, and connected by loss. That's one thing COVID really awakened in me. Americans lost more to COVID than they have in all of our wars combined, including the US civil war. So finally, there's this collective grief, or mourning, or just loss, that might be a starting place for understanding the Iraqi experience.

And I think the other thing that's tangential to that, not directly COVID related, is that for the first time, we're experiencing militias in our own government moments. We're experiencing loss across the country. We're experiencing division within families. This is the kind of experience that Iraqis have been having over the last 20 years. Of course, it's not the same. But it might be enough for people to empathize a bit more.

And that's one reason why we were excited to set it in Michigan and Flint, in the heart of an American community.

Was there anything you enjoyed about what film lets you do that you can't do on stage?

HR: There's a ton of things I love about film versus theater, but for this piece, the thing I loved the most was being able to say the lines about Iraq that I'd said other times before, but for us to see the United States.

I loved that we could be talking about the Tigris and Euphrates, those two epic rivers in the cradle of civilization, but we were looking at the Flint River. I loved that we could be talking about the Amariyah bomb shelter, but be looking at a bathroom in the basement of a church in Flint. To be walking around a Flint neighborhood, talking about what happened in Iraq? There's just no comparison for hoping that on some subconscious level an audience will go, "Oh my god. We always want to 'other' the other person, but these things are so close to home if we open our own eyes."

ZB: It's interesting, because both political ends of the spectrum use the mythologies of other countries as the threat to what is happening here. What I love about the juxtaposition and interweaving that Heather is describing in terms of Iraq, Michigan, and America more broadly, is that we see ourselves through a prism that can't just be turned into a cartoon. It's a history that we are implicated in, but it's also something with a distinctive culture that is separate from us. How do we navigate what seems similar and what seems different all at once? We actually have to be in dialogue with it over and over again...I love that it is not an easy juxtaposition, and it is filled with nuance. But that is what it's asking us to consider in every frame.

There are places that get defined, often incorrectly or inadequately, by the crises they experience. Here in Philadelphia, there are neighborhoods that become known as the epicenter of the opioid academic. Those have been places that have had people with rich lives for decades, but that's what they're known by now. It's similar with Flint, Michigan. And I wonder if that's true for some of these characters coming from Iraq, as well.

HR: I'm thinking of how Baghdad was the cradle of civilization. How the rivers were why this place was the first to invent algebra, and farming, and bricks, and wheels. And Flint, in my grandparents' lifetime, was the richest city in the nation, or one of them. Flint and Detroit were "car central." This was where industry and jobs were. And that [Iraqi] church is there because immigrants flock to this area for jobs.

And now that neighborhood is really struggling. So, I think the juxtaposition between being a place of prosperity and now being a place of intense struggle, even purely economically and with resources, is a reason why the stories of the Flint River and the Iraqi people are connected really amazingly.

Zak, what makes this a play that you think fits a Chester County audience? What spoke to you about it?

ZB: With every production there's a question of whether it is a mirror or a window. Is this something that an audience is getting a chance to peer into that they don't know much about? Or is it something where they're seeing their reflection in some capacity? ... For different communities, there are different mirrors and different windows. Chester County is a very fast growing part of the state in a very purple part of the country.

There is this dimensionality of womanhood in the play where the intersecting and individual lives of these women caught within a political vortex, a violent vortex, are speaking about love, passion, art, all these different things. It's a rare example of that in theater. And so here we were, in the middle of this gigantic vortex. And my feeling was, who would I want to hear from in this moment to help me understand the mosaic of emotional experiences and identities and lives that we're all trying to struggle to figure out how to integrate and be part of? I immediately thought of Heather and her work in general, but then also what Nine Parts succeeds so powerfully in doing. I was curious what she would want to do with that in this moment.

I think there are a lot of people who feel caught in the middle of some powers that they don't know how to grapple with, who are living vibrant, full, multi-dimensional lives, who don't feel seen because everything around them is categorizing and labeling in different ways. So, I feel like there's something that people identify with very strongly in the play and now in the film.

How much of the production process did you get to be a part of as it was all coming together?

HR: I purposely didn't watch while we were shooting because I didn't want to get in my head. I was super just amazed when I saw the very first edit. I remember thinking that I knew what we were doing was ambitious, but until I saw the first edit - I can't even articulate it now, but I was like, "Oh my god, this was ambitious." The specificity of the shots, the lighting - that's the kind of stuff that you just get to be blown away by.

The other part of the process I so appreciate was just how much each edit of the film told a very different story, and how none of them were wrong. It was just a deep whittling down to the truest story. It was the story we started with, but first edit to last edit is a real journey that is totally in other people's hands, hearts, minds, and visions. So, yes, I was part of it, but I definitely wasn't at the table with my sleeves rolled up. It was beautiful and impressive and ambitious and exciting.

Where can people watch it, and until when?

ZB: It's available at peopleslight.org. We're extending the streaming period until February 20. Additionally, there will be a free, virtual Q&A with Heather that audiences can attend on February 20 at 7 p.m. It's a work still evolving, so input on the work during the streaming period can be helpful.

HR: March 19th and 20th are the anniversary of the Iraq war, depending on where you were, so it's going to air on Detroit's PBS station on March 24.

Do you imagine wanting to find a home for it forever, or just letting recur whenever someone's able to air it?

HR: I think I'd like it to have a home. I know I'd like it to have a life in people's living rooms, but I'd also like it to have a home where it's studied a lot in universities, but also high schools. Because it is from the play but so different from the play, I think it's a great thing to live side by side with it, where you can still read the play and know that your imagination can run wild, because this thing is not telling you it's the definitive version of the play. It's never putting a stamp on it.

Head to peopleslight.org to stream the performance now until February 20. Viewers are invited to the Q&A on February 20.

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