The only real beneficiaries of war are the merchants who sell weapons, but occasionally the terrible tragedy of it all spawns great art. It is difficult American civilians who have not faced unending wars in our back yards, to know the toll it exacts upon the psyche- never mind to understand Middle East culture. So, with it’s internationally acclaimed script, ostensibly revealing the world through the eyes of Iraqi women, carried by rave reviews from London to New York; “9 Parts of Desire” comes to the current Lyric Stage Company installment with high expectations. It is a performance that does not disappoint.

The collected voices of pain and love bottled in the vessel of actress Lanna Joffrey, spill out to the audience through nine fictional characters based upon hours of interviews by playwright Heather Raffo. Ms. Joffrey has successfully taken the reins of this personal one women show under the direction of Carmel O’Reilly. We are fairly riveted by the actresses ability to cycle through lives of women who represent intimate icons of hearts torn asunder by successive wars. It is not the pain of watching suicide bomber news reels, but sorrow trying to realize itself, to perhaps make the impossible escape to freedom. To be free to love, without the suspicious disappearances of relatives, torture, sexual mutilation, propaganda, guns, raining bombs, tribal battles, or extremist agendas posing as the morality of Islam. We cannot cry because we are too stunned.

The show begins with a Muslim prayer, and we are perhaps a little perplexed by Mulaya, a hired mourner, who appears in silhouette carrying a large container of shoes on her head, only to dump them in the river of souls that makes her cry out for a pastoral past, when Iraq was the garden of Eden, and not a polluted battle field. As Ms. Joffrey transitions to each character with the assistance of the abaya, or traditional black robe, we meet: Artist, Bedouin, London Exile, Doctor, Young Girl, Bomb Shelter Survivor, an American, and a Seller of Things. Quite admirably Ms. Joffrey cycles through the entire group of distinct personas and voices. While interweaving stories, she brings the audience to nervous chuckles, or deafened silence. Sometimes Mother Courage, weeping lover, plaintive artist, or demonstrative sage- each intersecting at the crossroads of pain, trying to free herself elegiac over the boundaries of desire.

The artist Layal who paints nudes of woman’s bodies hidden in trees, so as not to draw the ire of male viewers, calls attention to Iraqi men’s abuse of womanly love, though she is a curator for the Saddam Museum. When Amal, the Bedouin rifles though her unsuccessful marriages, we become acquainted with the prison of sexual inequality Iraqi women endure. Because Saddam has “made beasts of men” and women contain nine parts of the ten aspects of sexual desire, and men only one, (as declared by an ancient Caliph), women’s relationships with men seem peculiarly one sided. The Doctor explains strange radioactively deformed children, and her experience of telling a young girl that no she is not developing one breast at puberty, but that she has breast cancer. There are lighter moments, for example, when a young Iraqi girl’s “In Synch” video is cut short because the generator has gone out, and she rhapsodizes about how she can’t go to school because she exchanged jokes with the American soldiers, with whom she is infatuated because they look like sexy Justin Timberlakes.

The Iraqi American who lives in New York makes and receives desperate I love you calls to home during 911, later mentions that the native born, notorious for revealing all their problems on Oprah, don’t want to know the Iraqi body counts, and hate to watch the war on TV because “it depresses them.” Nevertheless they still comment to her how “heart breaking” it is during their pedicures. Because of the world these women have lived in for generations they no longer believe in revolutions, or trust the Americans. Perhaps we cannot ever reach mutual understanding, but works like this open a chink of light on both sides of the international divide to illuminate people obscured by wars. Though the production values were not magnificent for this show, this is a work that is strangely uplifting, emotionally informative, and spectacularly performed.