Aviva Armour-Ostroff on 9 Parts of Desire

When Aviva Armour-Ostroff first auditioned for 9 Parts of Desire, she was hesitant about taking part. The play, written by Iraqi-American playwright Heather Raffo, revolves around nine Iraqi women from various backgrounds who each have a story to tell the audience. But as a white woman, Armour-Ostroff wondered if it was her place to tell that story.

“We had a lot of conversations about that, Kelly [Straughan, the director] and I,” says Armour-Ostroff over the phone from her home in Toronto. “I asked her about her reasoning and her discussion with the playwright, and I really liked her answer, which was this story needs to be told, period. If it’s us that tells it, that’s not a bad thing.”

In the play (produced by Seventh Stage Productions in Toronto), Armour-Ostroff plays a doctor who contends with horrifying birth defects and illnesses in her patients as she struggles to work in an underfunded, rudimentary hospital setting. “She’s not asking you to feel sorry for her or for her country,” says Armour-Ostroff of her character, who, like the others, speaks directly to the audience as a ‘trusted friend.’ “She’s just stating the facts.”

The play deals with issues in Iraq over the last 30 years, and also features the perspectives of a sexy painter, a radical Communist, a young girl obsessed with Justin Timberlake, and an Iraqi American desperate to contact her family in the Middle East. When I ask Armour-Ostroff if being Jewish affected her take on her character, she pointed out that living in Canada has had the biggest effect. “I’m not a Jewish woman living in Israel, where I’m sure I would have a lot more visceral responses to war,” she said. “I would know what it would be like to live with bombs going off outside my house, and frankly I don’t.

“But that’s where the acting comes in,” she continues. “You draw on your own experiences of fear or loss or whatever it is you’re experiencing in the play, and you promote that. And ultimately it’s about doing justice to the story that’s being told in order to share it, to enlighten people and move people.”

Armour-Ostroff has a history of taking on roles far removed from her own personal experiences, from Mother Teresa in Birdland Theatre’s The Last Days of Judas Iscariot to Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker. And on the flipside, she has long devoted herself to creating opportunities for members of the theatre community. Armour-Ostroff started a monthly cabaret in 2001 where fellow artists could test out new material, which eventually grew into the annual Lab Cab Festival at the Factory Theatre.

“It came about because I recognized there was a real need for my peers at that point, which was almost 10 years ago, to have a really safe place to experiment with stuff that they were developing,” says Armour-Ostroff. The free, all-ages event runs for two days every September and features dancers, actors, musicians, filmmakers, and artists performing in all the nooks and crannies of the theatre. “If we can join those forces, then we start to share audiences and share ideas. It just makes the whole artistic community a lot stronger,” she explains.

Armour-Ostroff finds it “too stressful” to produce and perform at once, so she’s reverting to the former – for now – when 9 Parts of Desire finishes on Sunday. (Besides Lab Cab, she’s also on a year-long grant as associate artistic director at Theatre Passe Muraille.) But she can’t stay away from the stage for long. “As much as I love theatre and I love being involved in all aspects, for me personally I need to find a balance between being onstage and being behind the stage,” she says.

Though the performance schedule of 9 Parts of Desire will be brief – it only runs for seven shows – the experience leading up to it has stayed with Armour-Ostroff, who researched the history of Iraq and spoke to two Iraqis to prepare. “I have a tendency to block out things that I can’t really take, like to see all these images of war,” she says. “It’s so brutal and I can’t absorb it, listening to the news or watching it on TV, I can’t actually absorb it so I don’t. And now I’m in a position, because life has brought me here – it is really a gift – to be in a position where I’m forced to take it in and to learn and to understand and to absorb it.” She describes the impact of the play as something she can only understand on a “soul level.”

“We talk about collective unconscious, or we talk about everyone being connected, we’re all one, and that there’s that part of me that is affected on a true level, and my brain…has to catch up to my soul to be open to really understanding it, as brutal and painful as it is,” she says.

9 Parts of Desire runs until May 23 at The Theatre Centre. For more information, visit www.seventhstageproductions.com.