Heather Raffo Opera 'Fallujah' Tracks A Marine’s Return Home From Iraq
Heather Raffo in New York City. Photo: Nina Roberts
Published on Cultural X Lab in the fall of 2016
“I’m interested in moral dilemmas,” says the Brooklyn-based actor and writer Heather Raffo. Her latest work as the librettist for the opera Fallujah, is about a marine’s complicated, emotionally fraught return home after fighting in Iraq. Fallujah is slated for its New York City premiere November 17 – 20, 2016, at New York City Opera, playing at The Duke on 42nd Street.
“How do we bounce back?” Raffo asks rhetorically about the unimaginable horrors and human suffering inflicted by war at large, from seeing a comrade blown-up by an IED to enduring systematic rape, “How do we continue loving?”
Sitting in a bustling Brooklyn restaurant close to Raffo’s home where she lives with her husband and kids, she explains Fallujah was inspired by the real life story of marine sergeant Christian Ellis who fought in Iraq. It spans the hours while the main character loosely based on Ellis—who has struggled with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) including several suicide attempts—is trying to reunite with his mother for the first time upon returning from Iraq.
Raffo received a nascent Fallujah storyline created at City Opera Vancouver; she rewrote it. Rather than have the main character die a hero by saving an Iraqi boy’s life, the opera focuses on a soldier facing his post-war demons. “The harder story is the one he’s actually living,” says Raffo, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, gesticulating to stress the point.
Not only are some veterans living with PTSD, says Raffo, but also what she calls “moral injury,” when a person is sanctioned to do something in a particular situation that would be morally wrong in another. “How do you fit those pieces together afterwards?” asks Raffo, imagining the obstacles some veterans face returning to civilian life.
Stories of human resilience intrigue Raffo, her works have embraced controversial subjects. In 2004, just one year after the US-led invasion of Iraq, Raffo wrote and starred in the one-woman play Nine Parts of Desire. Through the lens of nine Iraqi women, one an Iraqi-American, the play gave audiences intimate insight into those living in Iraq at that time. These nine women talked, often sprinkled with dark humor, about life under Saddam and living through their countries’ variou s wars and invasions.
Raffo’s interest in Iraq is more than just U.S. foreign policy humanized through theater, it’s personal; she’s half Iraqi. “My identity is fully committed to understanding both sides and working to bridge them,” says Raffo, who considers her cultural fluidity as an asset rather than cause for identity confusion. She admits to getting a kick out of challenging anyone’s ill-conceived stereotype about who a half Iraqi-American might be; she’s been told she looks like a typical Iraqi woman and the American girl next door. Another layer of possible confusion for those who attempt to pigeonhole her, she was raised Catholic.
Exhaustive hours of official interviews, casual conversations, observation and research go into the crafting each of Raffo’s scripts. In preparation for Fallujah, she spent ten hour days talking with Ellis for a week; he stayed in a B&B near her home. “I knew what the stories were, I’d heard them from the other side,” recalls Raffo from her ten years of research for Nine Parts of Desire among other theater projects, “I knew it was awful, I was just wondering how he perceived it.”
Growing up in suburban Lansing, Michigan, with an Iraqi dad and American mom, she’d always been drawn to her Iraqi heritage. It wove its way into her childhood through music, food, visits from relatives and family friends, and one family trip to Iraq. But Arabic was not spoken at home, nor did she did grow up in an Arab immigrant or Arab American community. Raffo had fantasies about going to Baghdad for summer vacations to visit her grandmother and cousins, like someone with Italian heritage might visit family in Italy. “That was off the table because of every war,” states Raffo.
She recalls the exact moment her general intrigue with Iraq shifted to an acute hunger for knowledge. While Raffo was a student at the University of Michigan, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour was reporting live from rooftops in Iraq, it was the start of first Gulf War. “That’s my family, oh my God,” Raffo recounts, watching the TV, while the landscape was an anonymous foreign place to most of her classmates. “I’m half Iraqi, half American,” Raffo remembers thinking, “and there’s a war between Iraq and America.”
Fallujah, why an opera?
“I can’t think of any other form that is as powerful,” says Andreas Mitisek, the Artistic and General Director of Long Beach Opera, which was the first theater that presented Fallujah in March 2016, after it was birthed at City Opera Vancouver. Indeed theater and movies are also powerful narrative art forms, but Mitisek believes because of music, opera can reach a level of meaning? resonance? in the viewer that’s harder to touch with just language.
Raffo concurs. “There are things so unspeakable, that there’s no way to communicate them upon coming back,” says Raffo about the returning marines she interviewed. “Using the human voice as a musical instrument can express something that just might be unspeakable,” she adds.
The physical and mental health of returning vets is not just the conversation the U.S. should be having, believes Raffo, but is a national responsibility. “Who is coming back? And how are they? And what are we going to do about it?” asks Raffo.
While “Fallujah’s” intense moral and emotionally charged themes are standard opera fare, its political themes are not considered traditional crowd-pleasers. Michael Capasso, New York City Opera’s General Director had no hesitation about bringing it to New York after watching a performance at Long Beach Opera. “It’s not a piece that’s meant to leave you laughing and toe tapping,” says Capasso, “It provokes thought.” He notes that while the subject matter is difficult, it’s important; the Iraq War is now a major part of American history. There will be a free Fallujah performance especially for veterans.
Opera carries the baggage of catering to elite audiences. Mitisek counters with a simple O.P.E.R.A. acronym, “We’re just talking about experiences that are Outside the box, Provocative, Engaging, Relevant and Adventurous.”
Throughout Raffo’s entire career she’s made her works accessible to a variety of audiences. When “Nine Parts of Desire” played off-Broadway and in theaters across the U.S., Raffo also took it into high schools, universities and community centers — she notes the audience reactions were just as intense as in the theaters.
Raffo believes the arts can be deeply soulful and move audiences through a cathartic journey, without a good or bad, right or wrong message at the end. In-depth human stories can transform how audiences see the “other,” even something as simple as one of her “Nine Parts of Desire” characters simply taking off her traditional robe-like abaya covering.
“Since 9/11 I’ve sort of been waiting for the times to be less severe,” says Raffo, who wonders if she’ll ever be able to say, “Let’s do a Shakespeare play now!’” or another type of lighter fare theater piece. “Sadly,” says Raffo, “there has just been no break.”