Ruined

Kate Whoriskey, the director of the 2008 world premiere of Ruined, writes in her Introduction that she and Lynn Nottage, the playwright, were “compelled by the notion of staging a woman’s complicated relationship to war” (ix), taking inspiration from Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 play Mother Courage and Her Children. Nottage chose to set the action in the Congo, where “[a] violent war over natural resources had been raging” (ix), a war that Nottage felt deserved more than “the lack of interest the international community showed for such a devastating conflict” (x). Together, Nottage and Whoriskey traveled to Uganda and coordinated with Amnesty International in Kampala, so they “could use contacts to set up interviews with Congolese women who had crossed over the border to escape the violence” (x).

The interviews with the women and with other people Nottage and Whoriskey met, like their driver and a lead doctor at a hospital, revealed that “rape is integral part of any war” (x), “a tool to humiliate the women and to degrade the opposing side’s masculinity” (xi), as well as a way to ensure that the women “were left without the ability to produce children” (xi). As well, Nottage and Whoriskey learned that, often, the rapists “were themselves victims of unspeakable violence” (xi).