‘Eclipsed’ assaults the senses
If you often feel tempted to spout, or even just subscribe to, liberal pieties about gender dynamics in developing countries, Danai Gurira’s “Eclipsed” offers a salutary reality check.
That’s not to say that seeing the drama, set in a rebel camp during the Second Liberian Civil War, feels like an act of duty. What’s most striking about this play, which opened Thursday, March 9, as the second full production in the newly renovated Curran, is that it doesn’t single out any of its five female characters as its mainspring, the focal point around which everyone else
orbits.
All five women, four of them the wives of a single unseen commanding officer, get to make life-and-death decisions that drive the play, that fall in that elusive dramatic sweet spot: No choice feels like a foregone conclusion. You can’t predict who will try to escape her degradation, and when and why, nor who will respond to violence with violence of her own. Yet in retrospect, each decision reveals itself as the inevitable next step of artfully constructed character and circumstance. Strung together, those choices have the pared-down but inexorable forward motion of Greek tragedy.
“Eclipsed” has already made history as the first play to premiere on Broadway whose cast and creative team were all women of color. Additionally, its director, Liesl Tommy, who reprises her role at the Curran, was the first woman of color to garner a Tony nomination for direction of a play.
Just as noteworthy as those milestones is the agency Gurira grants her female characters — still too rare a quality in contemporary theater — and the shades of nuance Tommy’s ensemble of five bring to their interpretations, even as the wives call themselves only “Number One,” “Number Two,” etc., referring to the order in which the commanding officer took them.
Watch as the latest captive wife, Number Four, also known as the Girl, returns from being raped for the first time, communicating the horror of the act all the more forcefully in showing only its aftermath. As played by Ayesha Jordan, she stands unsteadily, hesitatingly scratching a thigh, less because of an itch than as part of a doomed effort to locate what’s changed in her. Her vacant stare is that of a mortally wounded animal; she is a being sapped of the spirit that had hitherto animated her.
Equally superb is Akosua Busia as Rita, a member of the Liberian Women Initiative for Peace who visits the wives, exhorting them to name themselves, to say aloud “the name your mother and father gave you,” in an effort to restore their sense of worth, to help them remember a time before war. But her motives are just as selfish as they are humanitarian, and Busia manifests Rita’s crisis of conscience with a little girl’s diffident physicality. Especially before the indomitable Number One (Stacey Sargeant), who sees herself as her own sort of commanding officer, and the snippy Number Two (Adeola Role), who’s abandoned her role as wife for what she argues is a more liberating life as a soldier, Rita, who apparently has more status, education and freedom, is like a guilty child apologizing, begging for mercy, for a crime only she knows about.
To these complex characterizations Tommy adds lighting (by Jen Schriever) and sound (by Broken Chord) that make more explicit and potent the ghastliness of war that the script itself keeps understated. Red light will flash through an already smoldering backdrop palette, or a subwoofer-fueled chord will herald the horrors to come in the second act.
Tommy’s “Eclipsed” assaults the senses, and that’s part of the point: No longer is the world of this play one Western audiences can look away from or make stereotypes about.
You can’t predict who will try to escape her degradation, and when and why.
Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak