New York ? When Heather Raffo traveled to Iraq as a 4-year-old, she found a place of wonder, magic and awe.

Her eyes still grow wide as she talks of walking through the streets of Babylon, riding the donkey that delivered the morning cream or sleeping on the roof of her aunt’s house under the stars.

“I think I thought as a 4-year-old, ‘This is the best!”‘ she says now. “I went to this magical place when I was just old enough to know magical and different.”

It was a different kind of wonder that came over the Iraqi-American actress years later during the first Gulf War, when she walked into a bar and heard people cheering as they watched the greenish night-vision footage on television.

“It wasn’t pretty, and yet a lot of people were looking at it like a video game,” she says. “It was the first time I felt absolutely Iraqi and American, both equally in one given moment.”

Raffo, a blond, Midwestern child of an Iraqi father and American mother, hardly looks the part of the Iraqi everywoman. However, in her one-woman show, “Nine Parts of Desire,” she brings to life nine different women who have suffered, loved and even flourished under Saddam Hussein and the war to oust him.

The title is taken from the teachings of the seventh-century Imam Ali ibn Abu Talib, who wrote, “God created sexual desire in 10 parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one part to men.”

When she first read the hadith, in a 1995 book by the same name written by Geraldine Brooks, Raffo laughed. Then she realized it captured a deeper truth about women — Arab women in particular — and the layers of complexity within them.

“Within a single body there is this and more,” she says, referring to the nine characters she portrays. “And it reverberates.”

Diverse characters

Bundled up in purple snow pants and a black sweater in her dressing room at the Manhattan Ensemble Theater, Raffo chooses her words carefully, widening her brown eyes for emphasis. Anyone expecting a diatribe against the war will be surprised to find Raffo is more journalist than polemicist.

From dozens of interviews on three continents, she created characters as filled with ambiguity and contradiction as the stories of their homeland, ravished by a ruthless dictator and the American-led invasion to unseat him.

Among the characters are a vibrant artist who slept with members of Saddam’s regime, a grieving mother who stands guard over the bomb shelter where her family died and a child who dances to ‘N Sync and hasn’t been to school since the war began.

They tell of unimaginable horrors under Saddam: women kidnapped and forced to become sex slaves, then beheaded for being prostitutes; a menstruating woman hung upside down so her blood would run over her; a woman covered in honey and fed to hungry Dobermans.

“Their way, I promise you — their way it’s to torture the people close to you,” says one of the women, an expatriate living in London. “One woman I was with, they bring her baby, 3-months-old baby. Outside the cell they put this woman’s baby in a bag with starving cats. They tape-recorded the sound of this and of her rape and they play it for her husband in his cell.”

She asks: “How could these people have liberated themselves?”

‘Portrait of endurance’

Despite the horrors they have witnessed, the women in Raffo’s play are filled with wants and needs that have nothing to do with politics — love, sex, personal connection. They fret about their love lives and their waistlines.

During a rant about the war, the sole American character interrupts herself: “I should get something to eat — I’m fat. I should go to the gym and run. … Anyway I can watch it at the gym. People work out to the war on three channels.”

Raffo, who is in her early 30s, began gathering material for the play in 1993, when she returned to Iraq after the first Gulf War and saw the Saddam Art Center, filled floor-to-ceiling with portraits of the dictator. In a back room was a startling exhibit of nudes. She began to wonder about the woman who painted them — the infamous artist Layla Attar.

“I felt like she had captured me. I felt like I was the one who she painted,” Raffo says. She began speaking to people who knew the artist, who had died in an American bombing, and formed an image that would become the central character in “Nine Parts of Desire.”

The play has been warmly received by critics: The New York Times called it “a powerful collective portrait of suffering and endurance”; The New Yorker called Raffo “deft and vivacious.”

Since its debut at the Manhattan Ensemble Theater in September, the play’s initial limited run has been extended four times. It will move to the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles in the fall.

“I think a star is born with this,” David Fishelson, the Manhattan Ensemble Theater’s artistic director, says. “The second she opened her mouth, I knew she had that thing, that ‘it,’ that charisma.”

Women the same everywhere

Raffo began writing the play when she was in a graduate acting program at the University of San Diego. She says she didn’t know how to write — and she’s happy about that.

“I think if I knew how to write I might have imposed a structure on it, and I’m really glad that I didn’t,” she says.

Although the characters are based on her interviews, nothing in the play is verbatim. She likens her portraits of the women to songs — a tribute to the essence within them.

“Aren’t we all all these women?” she asks. “Aren’t we all on all sides of these issues?”

One character, based on a Bedouin expatriate, tells of finding her husband in bed with her best friend. When the woman came to see the show at a performance in London, she sat in the second row with flowers in her lap and cried. Later, she told Raffo about the power of watching people understand her.

“‘I felt like a woman for the first time in my life watching your play,”‘ Raffo says the woman told her. “‘I realized that women are sort of the same everywhere.”‘

Raffo hopes the glimpse into the lives of the women of Iraq will help lift a veil of misunderstanding.

“On some level I want the audience to feel themselves approaching these women, like they’re not that different, that we’re not separate from Iraqis, that our future is not unbound,” she says. “It is bound to Iraq as it is to all nations.”