Lupita Nyong’o                                            Photos by Joan Marcus

 

 

 

                                 By Ron Cohen

 

It’s a rare work of theater that can transport audiences to a totally unfamiliar terrain and hold them there, transfixed, from start to finish. But that’s exactly what playwright Danai Gurira -- with the help of a brilliant cast and director -- accomplishes with Eclipsed. Her breathtaking drama depicts the lives of women caught up in the civil wars that ravaged the African Republic of Liberia toward the end of the last century and into this one. In addition to detailing the harshness of their circumstances, it celebrates with a sense of exhilaration their humanity. 

 

After a sold-out run at The Public Theater, the production has moved to Broadway, significantly adding to the serious and diversity quotients of the season. It also brings into further prominence the celebrity of Gurira. Another of her plays, Familiar, has recently opened Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizon to critical raves, while she continues to attract fans as an actress through her role on the well-watched television series The Walking Dead.

 

In Eclipsed, Gurira creates richly drawn portraits of five characters. Four of them are the wives of the Commanding Officer, or CO as he’s called, of one of the many rebel armies fighting it out in the villages and bush country of Liberia. The women are primarily identified by numbers, indicating when they were taken by the CO. We see them going about their daily chores, washing clothes, cooking meals, cooing and quibbling over the loot the CO brings back to them from pillaged villages. We also see them fall automatically into submissive formation when the CO -- unseen by the audience -- appears outside the hovel in which they live and selects one of them to leave for a session of “jumping.”

 

Pascale Armand, Saycon Sengbloh, and Lupita Nyong'o

     

As the play begins, Wife #1, who though still in her twenties functions as both boss and mother, and Wife #3, younger and pregnant, are attempting to keep the young war orphan -- identified only as The Girl -- who has wandered into the compound from being discovered by the CO. But she quickly catches his eye and becomes Wife #4.

         

A bit later Wife #2 appears on the scene. She has left the domicile, learned to use an AK 47 and fights along with the men in horrific acts of war. She will become a fateful influence on The Girl, whose uneasy search for self-determination is at the center of the story.

 

Akosua Busia as Rita and Lupita Nyong’o 

 

The fifth character is a woman of the city, a former Liberian businesswoman who has become a member of the women’s group seeking to make peace among the country’s warring factions. But her visits to the war zones have a very personal motive as well.

         

Under Liesl Tommy’s knowing and expertly-paced direction, all these women come vibrantly alive from the moment they appear on stage. As Wife #1, Saycon Sengbloh exudes an appealing warmth along with a sense of motherly discipline, when dealing with the deliciously oversized reactions --  child-like delight alternating with childish petulance -- of Pascale Armand’s pregnant Wife #3.

         

As the belligerent Wife #2, Zainab Jah fairly burns the stage with the sizzle of her self-confidence and ingrained fury, while Akosua Busia makes Rita a contained but sympathetic figure.

         

The show’s marquee name is Lupita Nyong’o, who has won an Academy Award for her role in 12 Years a Slave and more recently furthered her resume with Star Wars: The Force Awakens. This graduate of the Yale School of Drama lives up to her Hollywood acclaim with a magnetic performance that makes transparent every turn in the formation of this young woman’s psyche.

         

Despite the grimness of the material, Gurira’s script frequently bubbles over with humor. The women’s exchanges of dialogue can take on an ironic edge, and the lilting Liberian English dialect they employ seems built for punch lines. (Beth McGuire is the voice and dialect coach.) The humor reaches a high point when #4, who has had some book learning, reads aloud from a battered biography of Bill Clinton, As they discuss the tribulations of Clinton and his “Wife #1” in the White House, it makes for a inspired fun-house mirroring of the women’s own battered lives.

         

Further heightening the authenticity and tensions of Gurira’s play are the appropriate grab-bag looks of the costumes by Clint Ramos, who also designed the gone-through-hell looking set.  Equally noteworthy are the lighting of Jen Schriever, taking us from the blaze  of the African day to the luminescence of enveloping night, and the sound design and original music of Broken Chord, ramping up the tension between scenes with ominous African percussion.

         

Helpful hint to the serious theatergoer: Gurira expertly embeds exposition into her dialogue. Still, a quick -- very quick -- course in recent Liberian history will help nicely in catching the script’s many political and historical allusions. Ten minutes with Wikipedia should do it and add smartly to your appreciation of Gurira’s masterful writing and the circumstances that have shaped  her indelible characters.

 

 

Playing at The Golden Theatre

252 West 45^th Street

212 239 6200

Telecharge.com

Playing through June 19th