Noura

by Heather Raffo

Moderated by TBD

Inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Eight years ago, Noura and her family fled their home in Iraq. Today, she plans the perfect Christmas dinner to celebrate their new life in New York. But when the arrival of a visitor stirs up long-buried memories, she and her husband are forced to confront the cost of their choices, and retrace the past they left behind. With compassion and startling clarity, Heather Raffo’s play charts the intricate pathways of motherhood and marriage — and the fragile architecture of what we call home. 

About the playwright

Her father is Iraqi, born in Mosul but lived in Baghdad. He was a civil engineer and her mother is American. Heather is Chaldean on her father’s side and Roman Catholic on her mother’s side.She grew up in Okemos, Michigan.[but lived in New York City for thirty years.Heather holds a BA from the University of Michigan where she studied Literature and Theater, and graduated Magna Cum Laude in Literature. A MFA from the University of San Diego and also studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Having been born in the United States, she and her family initially visited Iraq in 1974 when she was four years old, 1993 as a little girl, and again in 2013.[2] She also visited Iraqi family in Damascus and Dubai in 2006. She had flown in and her family drove since it was not safe to travel into Iraq at the time.

Raffo credits Ntozake Shange as her most significant artistic influence and has noted her as an inspiration to writing her own work after reading For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf.

Heather Raffo is most famous for her notable role in the one-woman play 9 Parts of Desire. The play focuses on the lives of women in her father’s homeland, and was originally conceived in 1993 after a visit to her Iraqi relatives. It was also inspired by Raffo’s trip to the Saddam Art Centre in Baghdad where she saw only billboard sized portraits of Saddam Hussein. Later, in a back room, she saw a painting of a nude woman clinging to a barren tree. She took a photo of the painting, returned to America and devised a way of replicating the painting into a play. A decade later she completed the play, which features monologues by nine highly distinct Iraqi women, all played by herself.

From Wikipedia

About the Moderator

TBD