Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 273
Lynn Nottage’s 2009 Pulitzer-Prize winning Ruined is set in a brothel in the Ituri Rainforest of the Congo, where
prostitution is at least somewhat better than torture and killing. Here, Coldola Rashad plays Sophie, an 18 year old
Congolese girl who has become the brothel’s bar singer after being brutally raped and ruined with a bayonet, and
is now being approached by transient soldiers, played by Kevin Mambo and William Jackson Harper. The play was
directed by Kate Whoriskey, who co-researched it with Ms. Nottage in Uganda; it opened at the Goodman Theatre in
Chicago in 2008 and at the Manhattan Theatre Club the following year. © Sara Krulwich/The New York Times/Redux
The Hill Town Plays, mirrored our current debt to the
ancient Greeks by presenting a “cycle” of violence and
familial vengeance that visits a young woman in rural
Massachusetts. All five of Thurber’s plays were staged
simultaneously in five different New York theatres;
audiences could witness echoes of ancient violence in
our current day.
Many recent plays have focused on torture, in particular,
such as Martin McDonagh’s Lieutenant of
Inishmore and The Pillowman (both nominated for
Tony Awards); David Wiener’s 2011 Extraordinary
Chambers, about the tortures and killings of Cambodia’s
Khmer Rouge regime; and the New Haven Long
Wharf’s reading of Philippe Sands’s book Torture
Team in the same year.
Other, more direct plays about actual human savagery
in historical events—episodes of police brutality,
the World Wars, the Holocaust, the atrocities of the
Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and the battlefields of Syria
and Iraq—have also proliferated worldwide. Violent and
unwanted sex in Africa is the central subject of Lynn
Nottage’s Ruined, the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner (the
title refers to the mutilation of a young woman’s genitalia
when she is raped with a bayonet), and rapes, killings,
dismemberments, and cannibalism are the subjects of
the late Sarah Kane’s Blasted, which, though premiering