TORONTO - Talk about the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
If memory serves, director Philip Akin stumbled across the work of playwright Lynn Nottage one day while scrolling the Internet.
Little did he know, it was a discovery that would make both Akin, an actor/director just beginning to earn his spurs as artistic director of Obsidian Theatre, and Nottage, an American playwright well launched on her rise to greatness, exciting fixtures on the Toronto theatre scene.
Akin, for his part, programmed Nottage's Intimate Apparel as part of the Obsidian season, crafting a production so good it was included in a subsequent season at Canadian Stage.
Between the two stagings, however, Nottage became on hot commodity, winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2009 for a work titled Ruined -- a work which had its Toronto premiere Thursday at the Berkeley Street Theatre, a production of Obsidian, in association with Nightwood Theatre
Fittingly, all things considered, it is directed by Akin.
And while Nottage makes a major leap in time -- from New York in the early 20th century in Apparel, to the heart of the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo in the early 21st -- in Ruined, Akin doesn't miss a beat.
Thanks to his work, this is a play and a production that commands the stage and demands the attention of anyone who loves quality theatre.
Ruined is set in a roadside establishment run by Mama Nadi, a hard-headed business woman played by Yanna McIntosh.
While a never-ending war between rebels and government troops of questionable pedigree wages outside her door, Mama welcomes all comers, offering everything from cigarettes to the post-coital opportunity to smoke them in a sprawling complex that is part general store, part shebeen, part brothel, all business.
It is in her capacity as madame that she takes in two young women brought to her by her supplier, Christian (Sterling Jarvis) -- Salima (Sophia Walker), a young wife and mother rejected by her family after being forcibly kidnapped and held as a sex slave for months, and Christian's niece Sophie (Sabryn Rock), so brutally raped by soldiers that she will never heal.
Almost heartlessly, Mama throws the newcomers in with Josephine (Marci T. House) where they are tasked with keeping Mama's varied clientele happy -- a task rendered all the more difficult by the fact that Mama welcomes all comers, regardless of the army for which they fight, taking payment in money, diamonds or even Coltan, a rare metal used in cell phones. With Andre Sills and Anthony Palmer cast as the commanders of the opposing sides, Mama's joint is a veritable powderkeg.
But, although it initially seems that its proprietor is a heartless entrepreneur, it turns out she's just a big-hearted pragmatist, her goal to help her girls survive the horrors they have endured in hope that healing will eventually follow.
Led by McIntosh, this is a fine ensemble, bolstered by Richard Alan Campbell, Daniso Ndhlovu, Muoi Nene, Thomas Olajide and Mark Senior, together more than equal, under Akin's direction, to the task of bringing discipline and definition to Nottage's big-hearted and sprawling script as it threatens to spill off a stage designed by Gillian Gallow and lit by Rebecca Picherak.
Still, there are standouts. While McIntosh adds another brilliant performance to the roster of memorable, enduring woman she has played, Jarvis is likely to steal your heart, while Walker is almost certain to break it, with the help of Rock and House.
In the midst of death and despair, Nottage, Akin and this cast have found a rich vein of humanity and hope, even love amongst the Ruined.
Don't miss it.
john.coulbourn@sunmedia.ca
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