Finding Love Among the Ruined, at Intiman [Photo Gallery]

How unexpected, after all the build-up–the Pulitzer Prize, the Drama Desk award, the Obie, the nine extensions of the run in New York, the first extension here before it had even opened–to find that a play set in Congo’s civil war, with Brecht’s Mother Courage as an antecedent, directed by the Whoriskey dynamo, meant mainly to deal with the intimate dramas of the heart.

You hear the rewind in the critical responses to Intiman’s co-production (with the Geffen Playhouse) of Ruined: when Misha Berson calls it “a throwback to the ‘well-made play‘” or Brendan Kiley notes the “result is more Tennessee Williams than Brecht, a drama of emotions and relationships.” You walk in prepared for sociopolitical outrage, steeled against theatres of cruelty, but are met instead by a story about the deeply, daily human hunger for an understanding touch.

That’s not to say that what I expected to see wasn’t there–insane brutality, rape and murder, prostitution, hunger, military gamesmanship, larcenies across the scale–but that the horror did not become a horror show. Playwright Lynn Nottage remains in constant step with her characters, living with their concerns. There is no grand scheme into which this all fits, for them. They don’t live in History, or in tragic CNN clips: it’s just life, and what you do to live.

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Secondly, I was surprised by the workaday lyricism of Nottage’s people. Removed in time and space, they’re kin to Sean O’Casey‘s inventive Irish, caught up in Troubles beyond anyone’s control, but speaking of it (whether with an almost-musical phrase or in anguished rant) with the faith that surely another human being would listen, would care to hear.

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The traveling supply-man Christian (Russell G. Jones) offers sprigs of poetry in the face of brothel-keeper Mama Nadi’s (Portia) disdain because he can imagine that she appreciates it, even though she parries with this:

Chocolate. I always ask you for chocolate, and you always tell me it turns in this heat. How many times have you refused me this year. Huh? But, she must be very very important to you. I see that. Do you want to fuck her or something?

Echoing this concern with the particular is Whoriskey’s direction. Watch just the hands of the actors. Above the waist, they’re alive with directed movement–pushing back hair, emphasizing. When they hang below, forgotten, they twist, pull, and crab. Watch Christian salaam submissively before an angry Commander Osembenga (David St. Louis, swelled with a muscular, martial egotism). It’s full of a desperate, wish-it-was-false sincerity.

Mama Nadi stands in her bar-and-brothel, which stands surrounded by the trunks of jungle and men in uniforms whose primary signification is that they are not the other side’s (Derek McLane’s set and Paul Tazewell’s costumes). In Portia’s telling, this is home, a way of making do, even of looking out for girls who have lost their place. Her Mama Nadi is rooted and gnarled and self-interested but not unreasonable, except when she gets stuck.

Her wayward girls–Salima (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), Josephine (Cherise Boothe), Sophie (Condola Rashad)–have only in common that a brothel was not their first choice. Josephine has come down in the world, and sees an elevator back up in Mr. Harari (Tom Mardirosian), an aging European wheeler-dealer who just wants to know whose palm to grease. Salima has the beaten, dogged tenacity of the long-abused, and Sophie just sings and tries to walk around her pain-frozen mid-section (“ruined” by gang-rape, bayonet).

Yet Nottage and Whoriskey won’t let these women become “stories.” They argue over chores, lie to each other, lend an ear. They scheme, they dream, they tiptoe around the truth, they wave it like a red flag in each other’s faces. They exist.

Of course the war will not stay outside, despite Mama Nadi’s ball-squeezing efforts. Of course someone has a secret which will be revealed. The artifice of plot (to the extent that it is, as remastered life) tries to bind together those moments you don’t easily forget, so they are remembered well: Sophie coming to life as she sings in Peter Kaczorowski’s humid evening light, exhorting you to dance like the war is over; Salima caught up in the recitation of her past, with one foot still in the world in which none of it, the soldiers, the abduction, has happened yet.