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5 elements that shape Lynn Nottage's masterwork
1. Salima
Seated in the living room of the brownstone in Brooklyn where she grew up and still lives, surrounded by the African and African-American art her parents collected, Lynn Nottage is talking about Ruined. She lays emphasis on a precept that guided her in giving flesh-and-blood character to the women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo whose experience of being brutally raped is the plav's central subject. In using the true Stories of these African women, the playwrighl drew carel ni lines between documentary reality and theatrical fiction. "The women told me their stories - they didn't give me their stories to tell." she says. "I didn't want to write a verbatim play. IrwouldVe been a dillerent relationship if they knew I was going to put their exact words on the stage. They would have censored themselves more, become much more self-conscious. Those are their stories, and they are sacred."
It is early summer of 2005. and Nottage is preparing to embark on a second journey to East Africa in order to collect more narratives of these refugee women, all survivors of war, rape and torture at the hands of armed fortes. Supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, accompanied by her husband, filmmaker Tony Gerber, as well as her father and daughter, she is planning to visit refugee camps in Kenya and Uganda for a little over a month. She'd already been there in the summer of 2004. with director Kate Whoriskcy. who would help shape and direct the play, but this time around Nottage wants to stay longer. On the first trip, the two women couldn't enter the Contro, because war was still raffing in the Ituri Rainforest area and Congolese refugees kept flowing over the border into Uganda. I laving worked as a press officer for Amnesty International. Nottage was aware that virtually none of the media narratives provided by Western reporters had investigated the plight of raped and mutilated women whose numbers have continuously risen since the war's official end in 2003. (That situation has worsened, with recent reports of sexual violation of some men and boys.) "I had no idea what play I would find in that war-torn landscape," Notlage says,...