Kirk Douglas Theatre
Los Angeles
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Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed offers an alternative to the typical, “condescending Western way of relating to African hardship,” said Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times. The playwright has chosen a daunting subject—a group of civilian women “in war-gouged Liberia,” imprisoned by the rebel army and held as a commanding officer’s “wives.” Gurira successfully captures “the rhythm of these women’s coping strategies and the rhyme of their compromised choices” in this compelling work of “theatrical sociology.” Kidnapped and brought into the mix is “the Girl,” a bright teenager who struggles to assimilate. Though protected by two of the wives, the Girl faces a challenge from the wife known only as “No. 2”—a “rabble-rouser” who seems to have graduated from “concubine to combatant.”
One can’t help but admire how Gurira imbues these unfamiliar characters with the “genuine breath of life,” said Bob Verini in Variety. The playwright spent time in Liberia in 2007, gathering information from interviews with former kept women and female soldiers. As her characters sit around “waiting for the ‘Big Man’ to request their services,” her firsthand reportage gives the dialogue an “awesome authenticity,” strengthened by solid performances from the play’s four women—Miriam Glover, Edwina Findley, Bahni Turpin, and Kelly Jenrette. Though director Robert O’Hara’s production stalls a bit in the second act, it explodes like a “powder keg” in its final moments. Watching the women of Eclipsed enact their respective fates is “as riveting as anything on a local stage today.”
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