TOP PICK - Ruined - to May 3

New York premier at the Manhattan Theatre Club (at City Center, W. 55 Street), written by the talented playwright Lynn Nottage and directed by Kate Whoriskey.
Ben Brantley published this favorable review on Feb. 11 in the NY Times:

Patrons are asked to leave their bullets at the bar in the Congolese brothel that is the setting for “Ruined,” the strong and absorbing new play by Lynn Nottage at the Manhattan Theater Club. Mama Nadi (Saidah Arrika Ekulona) runs a cozy little whorehouse — one of the cleanest and safest places in the area — and she’s determined to keep it that way. That means no bullets, no brawling, no unwashed hands and no talk of the civil war being waged in the rain forest outside.
But no matter how vigilant Mama is, evidence of a cruel and bloody conflict keeps trickling in, like isolated raindrops from a storm. It’s not so much the sound of gunfire. Mama and her customers are used to that. It’s what is in the eyes and postures of the women who work for her. Like Sophie (the exquisite Condola Rashad), Mama’s 18-year-old bookkeeper and bar singer, who walks with the stiff, wide-legged gait of someone who feels pain with every step she takes.
The play in which Mama Nadi appears is not unlike the house over which she presides. “Ruined,” which opened Tuesday night in a vivid production directed by Kate Whoriskey, is a comfortable, old-fashioned drama about an uncomfortable of-the-moment subject. But whereas Mama, a latter-day variation on Brecht’s Mother Courage (the Brecht play partly inspired “Ruined”), uses hominess and familiarity to shut out the terrors of war in Congo, “Ruined” craftily creates the same atmosphere to bring those same terrors to our attention.

Ms. Nottage, the wide-ranging and increasingly confident author of “Intimate Apparel” and “Fabulation or, the Re-Education of Undine,” hooks her audience with promises of a conventionally structured, purposefully plotted play, stocked with sympathetic characters and informative topical detail. She delivers on those promises.
Yet a raw and genuine agony pulses within and finally bursts through this sturdy framework, giving “Ruined” an impact that lingers beyond its well-shaped, sentimental ending. The play isn’t a form-shattering, soul-jolting shocker like Sarah Kane’s “Blasted,” another and more innovative study in wartime atrocities (which had its New York premiere at the Soho Rep last year), or an intellectual epic like “Mother Courage and Her Children.”

Our friends Stephanie and Victor provide an enthusiastic endorsement and encourage us all to see Ruined.