9 Parts of Desire at Portland Center Stage

This Off Broadway hit was inspired by the playwright's trip to a modern art museum in Baghdad in August 1993, and details the lives of nine Iraqi women that span the decades between the first and second Gulf Wars and occupation. Described by The New Yorker as “an example of how art can remake the world,” it is a portrait of the extraordinary (and ordinary) lives of a cross-section of Iraqi women: a sexy painter, a radical Communist, doctors, exiles, wives and lovers. This work delves into many conflicting aspects of what it means to be a woman in a country overshadowed by war.