It's not that Mama Nadi is without feelings; it's that she can't afford to indulge them. The only way she can keep her bar/brothel open in the wartime anarchy of the Eastern Congo is by taking no side in the war and by bringing a hard-nosed calculation to every encounter. The main conflict in Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "Ruined," is not the war raging around Mama's bar but the conflict between feeling and self-interest raging within Mama's head.
When she discovers that one of the girls, Sophie (Zurin Villanueva), is "ruined," her genitals mutilated by soldiers' bayonets, Mama insists that Christian take her back. No, he pleads; she's his niece and she'll be safe here. Only when the uncle offers to throw in a hard-to-get box of Belgian chocolates does Mama agree.
The same conflict is at the heart of "Ruined." Amid another war in another country in another century, Mama must also adjust her feelings to the necessities of the moment. She may be angry at the way the soldiers manhandle Sophie, Salima (Monique Ingram), and Josephine (Jade Wheeler), but she can't afford to lose the customers or to have the soldiers wreck the place, so she distracts them with sweet talk and liquor. She may long for a husband, but she knows no one could run the business as well as she does alone.
The biggest challenge in playing Mama is to convince an audience that one skinny woman could control a barroom full of drunken soldiers, wily traders, and rebellious prostitutes by sheer will alone. Ursula radiates such a force field that not only do Mama's customers and employees cower before her but so do we in the audience. As a result, the few moments she turns off that force field become moving epiphanies.
But the horrors of war are not the principal focus of Nottage's script nor of Tazewell Thompson's crisp direction. No, our attention is always turned to the question of what Mama must do to make the best of a horrible situation. We may not like the choices she has been given—offering blow jobs to killers or becoming the target of killers—but Nottage never pretends that the choice is something else. And Ursula, in a magnificent performance, makes it clear how much strength is required for such a decision and how much it takes out of her each time.
