In ‘Eclipsed,’ women try to survive civil war
In Danai Gurira’s “Eclipsed,” a visiting peacemaker’s probing question elicits a cry of anguish from one of the wives of a rebel commander: “I don’t know who I is outside war.”
In Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s gripping new production, Jacqueline Nwabueze portrays a woman whose identity has been so effaced by war that she struggles to whisper her actual human name into the kindly ear of visiting peacemaker Rita (Nancy Moricette). Like a soldier, she has been trained to see herself as her rank and serial number: Wife #1.
“Eclipsed” takes place near the end of the second Liberian civil war in 2003, in a rebel army camp. Child warriors, rape and atrocities were legion in this conflict, and each woman in this story has suffered something horrible. Nwabueze’s Wife #1 and two other women survive together in the compound as de facto sex slaves of an unseen commander: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee graduate Sola Thompson’s Wife #3, pregnant and concerned about her attractiveness and her place in the pecking order; and Matty Sangare’s Wife #4, a teenager who is literate, unlike the older women.
However, Wife #2, played by Ashleigh Awusie, has made a career change, picking up an assault rifle and becoming a rebel warrior. She’s clearly on a recruiting mission, wooing #4 with talk
of how powerful she could feel. Her character is inspired partly by Black Diamond, a real Liberian rebel leader. Gurira, a star of “The Walking Dead” and “Black Panther,” based her play on extensive interviews with Liberian women.
Their situation is grim, but Gurira’s play, directed by May Adrales, is not. It has a surprising amount of humor. In one cache of war spoils, the women discover a beat-up biography of Bill Clinton,
which Sangare reads to the others. Knowing little about America, they interpret his actions through the prism of African “big man” behavior — a frame of reference that elicits audience laughter and ironic recognition.
They have power struggles and philosophical arguments. And just when I think I have the characters figured out, one surprises me, as Nwabueze’s Wife #1 did, when she leads another troubled character in prayer.
Gurira’s play positions Sangare’s teenager as the character with crucial choices to make in this story. But each woman here, including the peacemaker, faces an existential crisis with the coming of peace. Their dilemmas make me think of former war correspondent Chris Hedges’ book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.” Each woman is truly a victim, but each has also become so defined by her role in the war that she struggles to imagine a life without it.