About This Show
Tyranny and war both come with extreme costs, and people often forget who pays. From the outside looking in, it’s easy to view a nation’s population as some formless group, joined by a shared religion or language. Writer/performer Heather Raffo spent 11 years conducting dozens of interviews on over four continents with Iraqi women. Her resulting “theatrical mosaic” depicts the realities of life in Iraq both under Saddam Hussein and since his ouster for several of these unique women, whose individual worlds have been frayed and fractured, sometimes beyond repair, by their country’s troubled history. While their stories share a theme of survival against shocking odds, Heather Raffo’s incisive distillation of their experiences shows us that both oppression and deliverance come with costs that may be too burdensome to bear, and their violent realities transcend something as simple as political polemic.
