Ruined

WRATH OF CONGO Ekulona bellies up to the bar.

Photo: Liz Lauren

In plays like Crumbs from the Table of Joy and Intimate Apparel, Nottage has painted evocative portraits of African-American life while demonstrating a subtle feeling for distant historical eras. She’s also shown a tendency to overstuff her plays with incident. Both her strengths and limitations are visible in the new work Ruined. Nottage tackles a horrific subject: the continuing brutalization of women during the decade-long civil conflict in the Congo; and she smartly uses Brecht to work through this difficult material.

The play’s center, Mama Nadi (Ekulona), the larger-than-life and studiously neutral proprietor of a bar/whorehouse on the fringes of the conflict, might as well be called Mama Courage. And the play’s most compelling moments emerge from the conflicted motives that lead her, like Courage, to alternately shelter and exploit her young charges. At its best, Ruined delivers a devastating punch, equal parts melodrama and scathing social exposé. It suffers, all the same, from an excess of subplots and an occasional overreliance on pat structures: When the gentle trader Christian (Russell G. Jones), for instance, explains his hard-won sobriety in the opening, his descent back into alcoholism is all too predetermined.

The Goodman’s production of Ruined crackles. Rashad’s singing and Dominic Kanza’s infectious soukous music provide welcome respite from the foreboding that suffuses the play. Bernstine’s second-act aria of suffering brings into stark relief the atrocities that Nottage indicts. On the other hand, Derek McLane’s dominating set and the bombastic sound design at the climax seem less suggestive of Mother Courage than Miss Saigon.