“Eclipsed” Last 10 days! See it now!

Written by Danai Gurira, directed by Liesl Tommy, world premier at the Woolly Mammoth, Washington, DC, until September 27, 2009 

In case you’re only going to read this one paragraph, I’m going to jump the gun. Don’t be put off by the subject of this play – five Liberian women in a rebel commander’s compound. Don’t file this event under “worthy but arduous.” Because this is the real deal: credible breathing funny characters emerge within minutes. You know them from the first volley of dialogue and action, and you understand the situation. This shack exists to serve and service CO, the commanding officer aka warlord who issues orders from just off stage to wives who call each other Number One and Number Three. As the lights come up, they are concealing from CO and the other men in the camp a third woman, a girl really, who has fled the fighting. The war, largely offstage, presses down on the play, as it did and does on Liberia. 

I like information, analysis and argument as much as the next woman, but the things I really know – outside my own experience – I learned from stories, through the powerful engagement that conjures empathy. The emotions experienced inside a story’s world burn into you and, fire-tempered, that knowledge stays. Such a story and such a world has Zimbabwean playwright and actress Danai Gurira written. 

A photograph from the conflict, featured in a New York Times article, sparked the play: three women combatants sporting tight jeans, attitude and AK47s. Gurira filed away the image and all it evoked. Years ago, she says (but it can’t be that many; she’s an elegant slip of barely 30), Gurira resolved to create stories about African women as real characters, not the usual stereotypes. If you were fortunate to see “In the Continuum,” the two-hander she wrote as her NYU drama school graduation project and performed in 2006 across the US and in her native Zimbabwe, you know she’d already begun to make good on that promise. Then, in 2007, she headed to peace-time Liberia to run workshops and interview numerous women about their experiences as combatants, wives, and survivors, as well as Peace Women in the mass movement credited with forcing the adversaries – Charles Taylor and the warlords opposing him – to the negotiating table and finally to a settlement. (As an innovative marketing strategy for “Eclipsed,” Woolly Mammoth held two screenings of “Pray the Devil Back to Hell,” a powerful documentary about the Peace Women.) Gurira taped many hours of interview and promised the women that she would tell their story. 

Pledging to do justice to real, live women’s experiences makes perfect moral and emotional sense, but compromised drama, right? In this instance, happily, wrong! I could tell you about Bessie, the wise Fool of the piece, and her wig (“it still mek me look like Janet Jackson oh”), or about Maima, wife Number Two who takes the war name Disgruntled when she becomes a soldier (“now Disgruntled do whot Disgruntled like and no man come do no stupid ting to me or tell me whot to do”), or about the girl, who “can read and write and do all dem book ting,” reading juicy snippets from the biography of a certain American president, or about Rita, the peace woman, and her double quest in this particular camp. But you’d do better to meet them yourself, embodied with great skill and conviction by five African American actors. Five of the twenty – as South African director Liesl Tommy points out – who are employed in productions of “Eclipsed” in Washington, DC, in New York, in Los Angeles, and at Yale. Under Tommy’s direction and through a process of physical and visual immersion, the actresses at Woolly Mammoth (especially Uzo Aduba playing Helena, Number One) move like women who pound cassava, who kneel to scrub clothes in a tub or on a river bank, and who carry water in buckets on their heads, that swaying gait that gives African village women such straight-back carriage. 

What is this, you’re asking, a commercial? Where’s the critique? Ok, then. My major beef with Gurira is titles. “In the Continuum”? “Eclipsed”? These could name just about anything, including the latest soft-focus teen vampire porn series. Then, one of the actresses is more difficult to hear than the others. More interestingly, on Q+A night, an audience member was concerned that the wider context wasn’t clear enough from the play – although the ties between Liberia and the US – “America our fada,” says Bessie – are woven throughout. Political artists and audiences want it all – the art and the analysis. Think of 1986’s “Place of Weeping,” Darrell Roodt’s first film: one slim story staggering under the burden of representing all of apartheid South Africa’s types and tribulations.

I wonder, too, how Gurira will fare with male African critics. We don’t see a single man in the play, but like the war itself their presence surrounds the stage. Of the men of the LURD army and their demand for village girls after fighting, Maima/Disgruntled tells the girl, “Dey is beasts and beasts need to be fed. It dat simple.” Will Gurira, like novelists Alice Walker and Tsitsi Dangerembga, be accused of betrayal? Or have we moved on? And/or does the context of war qualify the situation – and therefore men’s behavior – as extraordinary? Perhaps Women In and Beyond the Global will make space for more discussion on this. Once you’ve seen the play, that is. The Woolly Mammoth run ends on September 27^th. I’m all done pressing and exhorting. It’s up to you now. Except, to close, a few predictions:

You will leave Woolly Mammoth after a performance of “Eclipsed”

• speaking like a Liberian (at least inside your head) for many weeks to come – “Ya dat funny oh”
• your hands tingling from applause (and you might still be crying)
• with a new awareness of women and war
• living with and thinking about five characters, as if they were women you’ve known well and laughed with and care about, which by now they are. 

 Reviewed by Annie Holmes, knowledge coordinator for JASS (www.justassociates.org) and writer (www.pembaproductions.com)

Links

More about the play in Woolly Mammoth program notes:

http://www.woollymammoth.net/performances/show_content/Eclipsed_program_notes.pdf

Danai Gurira on NPR:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112636506

“Eclipsed” rehearsals in LA:

http://www.playbill.com/news/article/132140-PHOTO_CALL_Gurira%27s_Liberia-Set_Eclipsed_Rehearses_in_L.A.

Washington Post Review:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/07/AR2009090702044.html

Variety Review:

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117940982.html?categoryid=33&cs=1