Liesl Tommy directs “Eclipsed,” coming to the Curran.
One of Liesl Tommy’s missions as theater director is to wage artistic war on an imagined country — “the country called Africa.”
That’s part of what drew her to direct “Eclipsed,” Danai Gurira’s drama about the women all married to the same, unseen rebel commander during the Liberian civil war. It opens this week as the second full production in the newly renovated Curran, featuring Joniece Abbott-Pratt, Akosua Busia, Ayesha Jordan, Adeola Role and Stacey Sargeant.
Gurira grew up in Zimbabwe, and Tommy is originally from South Africa. “It’s (Gurira’s) mandate, and it’s something I’ve always fought for: telling African stories with specificity,” said Tommy in an interview on the Curran’s stage in September when the theater was still under construction.
“Eclipsed” made history in New York’s 2015-16 season. It was the first play to premiere on Broadway whose cast, director and playwright were all black women, and, as its director, Tommy became the first woman of color to garner a Tony nomination for direction of a play.
“There’s so much schlock out there — bad accents, unspecific environments — when it comes to telling stories about the country called ‘Africa,’ ” she said, citing, for instance, a movie set in Kenya that uses a South African band for the opening credits. “It just doesn’t make any sense, and it happens over and over.”
Yet in striving for specificity, she said, “I never wanted people in the audience to sit back and go, ‘Oh, so that’s how it is over there, for those people, in that place . ... I always wanted the audience to lean forward and be like, ‘I am they, and we are one.’ ”
For Tommy, the authenticity of the characters’ speech and dialect rang true from the first pages of Gurira’s script, which is written phonetically. (Sample line: “You say ha fada have restaurant — so she no need dat hep.”)
Tommy could tell that the language “comes from real depth of research. You can’t just, like, make that up. It’s so specific and real to each character. That was exciting to me, because it meant that I wasn’t going to have to pick up that slack and do that work. She’s done it.”
The characters’ genuineness isn’t just in their speech. Part of the genius of the script is the way it maps out how relatable characters can commit heinous acts: It’s not all at once but as a whole series of small decisions — each one
the only decision the character could possibly make in that moment.
Tommy said that the show has no “drop-off point,” where all of a sudden, after following the narrative effortlessly, the audience has to consciously choose to stick with the story. With “Eclipsed,” she said, “that never happens. You are buying all the events as they go along, so you don’t have to get into your head and do work that is our job.”
One of the show’s most striking and refreshing qualities is the absence of the wives’ brutish husband. Although he dominates their lives — they even refer to themselves as “Number One,” “Number Two,” etc., by the order that he took them — he never appears. The women register him only as a spectral force, snapping to attention when his presence nears, then slackening again when it’s gone.
Tommy recalled Gurira’s thinking about her play’s gender dynamics: “When you put a man in the midst of a women’s story, then suddenly — it’s just something about human nature — we all look at the man and go, ‘What’s he thinking?’ And then suddenly it becomes about him!
“It’s just what we do,” Tommy went on. “Because we’ve been trained from birth to think that that person’s experience is more valuable than these people’s experience. It’s completely unconscious, but it’s what it is. We just have to keep on fighting for equality and for equity any way we can.”
Tommy said it truly sank in just how revolutionary the show is at opening night curtain call. “When Danai and I went out for our bow with the actresses on opening night on Broadway ... it was us seven black women; we were making history, and it was really emotional,” she said. “But when I saw the audience — and I get choked up just talking about this — when I saw the audience all standing, clapping, and strangers just crying as they were applauding, that’s when I really understood: ‘Oh my God. No one has ever seen this before.’ ”
“When you put a man in the midst of a women’s story, then suddenly — it’s just something about human nature — we all look at the man and go, ‘What’s he thinking?’ And then suddenly it becomes about him!”
Liesl Tommy, “Eclipsed” director