Body work Deborah Lake Fortson’s adventures in the skin trade BY LIZA WEISSTUCH
	Body & Sold Written and directed by Deborah Lake Fortson. Set by Audra Avery. Lighting by Jeff Adelberg, Costumes by Jayde Chabot. With Alexander Albregts, Ozzie Carnan, Pilar Carrington, Liz Korabek, Megan Raye Manzi, Pallavi Nagesha, Wanda Strukus, Julia Sover, Kali R. Walker. Presented by Tempest Productions at the Boston Center for the Arts through June 26.

There is a stirring play in Deborah Lake Fortson’s Body & Sold, but you have to slog through a lot of sloppy dialogue and experimental-movement dross to find it. The playwright means to summon us to action against the heinous human-rights violation of international sex trafficking and teen prostitution by lifting individual voices out of the masses of victims. Although she’ll raise your awareness level just by expounding on the issue, her play offers such a glut of testimonies that the stories drown one another out. They’re all tragic, but you get such superficial exposure to each that they never take you where news reports and statistics cannot go.

Produced by Fortson’s company, Tempest Productions, Body & Sold is the latest of several works she’s developed pertaining to women’s lives in contemporary society. Past plays looked at dating violence and eating disorders. For this one, the process of creating the play seems a more moving journey than the final product. Fortson interviewed young people in Bombay, Calcutta, Connecticut, Boston, and Minneapolis. Using their accounts of being sold "like a vegetable," as one girl puts it, she assembled a performance piece that aims to express the unfathomable horror of being deceived, kidnapped, or manipulated and shackled into a life of slavery.

The testimonials cover an astonishing range of methods by which women end up as sex slaves. Some are sold by their lovers; others are hoodwinked by promises of better lives elsewhere; others are runaways who inadvertently link up with pimps. The circumstances of sex trafficking and its global reach are shocking enough, but a more effective play would have focused on a single victim, like Lukas Moodysson’s 2002 film Lilya 4-Ever, with its unflinching chronicle of an impoverished Estonian teen who after her mother runs off to America is seduced by a man who takes her to Sweden only to deliver her to a prostitution ring.

The first half of Body & Sold centers on two poor Nepalese girls who are guaranteed wealth by a married couple if they join them on a trip to India and smuggle back scarves for the black market. When they get to Calcutta, the squalid chaos of the city is clumsily evoked by ensemble members sashaying across the stage as they chant "rivers of silk," "piles of beads," and other images we should see. The two girls, of course, end up being traded on the black market. They’re played with pluck by Pilar Carrington and Megan Raye Manzi, young actors who do an admirable job conveying the internal conflict of skepticism and longing for riches, despite the stilted dialogue. But theirs is neither a linear nor a naturalistic tale. In quick snapshot scenes, we learn about their past, their harrowing experience at the brothel with tyrannical madams and brainwashed girls, human-rights workers’ rescue efforts, and the ultimate raid by the law enforcement. But it becomes muddled as other characters appear on stage to narrate similar personal experiences, at times sounding like the girls’ inner voices.

The second act is a montage of nine testimonials from American victims of sex trafficking as well as bossy pimps. We hear from a young gay man who runs away from his scornful Midwestern family and ends up a porn star, a Minnesota runaway who gets embroiled with club-scene pimps, and girls who’ve been sexually abused by a parent’s lover. Their accounts build simultaneously to climaxes, at which point all chime in together about the difficulty of overcoming trauma. The chorus approach conveys prostitution’s epidemic scope, but the straight testimonials suggest that we’re peering in on a group-therapy session.

Whatever its shortcomings as theater, Body & Sold does give a voice to silent sufferers. In a January New York Times Magazine story, a senior State Department adviser told reporter Peter Landesman, "We’re not finding [sex-trade] victims in the US because we’re not looking for them." Fortson’s search is evidence that this trade can be stamped out when the victims are sought out.