It is important to note right off the bat that Heather Raffo’s one-woman play, “Nine Parts of Desire,” has nothing to do with Geraldine Brooks’s nonfiction book of the same name. And when you’ve girded for an evening discussing female circumcision, it may seem almost a pleasant surprise to find only war, poverty, and fear.

Culling stories from a decade of interviews, Ms. Raffo’s catalog of Iraqi women manages to be more than an anthology of horror stories. Whether embodying a sexually liberated artist, a whiskey-gulping exile in London, or a Bedouin looking fruitlessly for love, Ms. Raffo finds refreshingly unfamiliar tales to tell well.

In one of many affecting moments, we see a young woman of Iraqi-American descent desperately trying to reach her relatives before the bombing destroys Baghdad’s phone lines. Finally getting her aunt, Ramzia, on the line, the only English the Iraqi can understand is “I love you.” The American girl and her aunt repeat the words to each other until the lines go dead. It’s an impossibly long sequence, the two insisting the three words to each other; the repetition moves from sentimentality to something indelibly powerful.

“Nine Parts” works in direct contradiction to all the laws of dramaturgy. As long as the monologues exist independently of one another, connected only by the tenuous link of Iraq, the evening holds water. At the 50-minute mark, however, Ms. Raffo begins to revisit her characters, forcing stories and “arcs” to emerge. By every rule ever written, this should step up our investment. It does not. Worse, she constructs lyrical book ending monologues to frame the evening. Suddenly the clever, cold light she has been shedding turns purple with prose. As a conduit for these women, Ms. Raffo does gorgeous, versatile work. Playing a character like herself, she works down to the raw bone of honesty. It’s only the unwelcome upholstering of the stories that feels false.

Antje Ellerman’s set hits the Middle East high-points: crumbling Moorish arches, tiled floors ripped apart by fault lines, plastic sheeting grunging up the light. The many visual metaphors are beautifully executed, but they also remind us of the show’s redundancies and occasional indulgences. Director Joanna Settle keeps Ms. Raffo moving swiftly between characters, whipping the black abaya robe around her in every possible variation. With skill, and simple adjustments of her gown, Ms. Raffo introduces us to a beautiful array of vibrant, warm, ordinary Iraqi women.