Eclipsed
starring Lupita Nyong’o
written by Danai Gurira
directed by Liesl Tommy
Golden Theatre
June 18, 2016
Production website
💉💉💉 out of 5.
It is hard to believe that a play created as a female-driven drama about sex slavery and genocide could make to the same Broadway that features Dirty Rotten Scoundrels across the street and School of Rock a few blocks away. Much of this success is due to the debut of Academy Award winning Lupita Wyong’o who has stepped away from her Lancome cosmetic ads to tell this story of 5 women trapped in a Nigerian camp where they survive by selling their bodies. What a transition this young actress has made!
I must admit that I had trouble connecting with the play at first. The Nigerian dialect was just too much for me in the early moments of the play. I lost word after word and began to distance myself from the play. But that was my fault. My ears just couldn’t engage fast enough. Once they did engage, I was captured. I loved the play for all I didn’t see. One never saw the abusive men of this story but every time that the women lined up and pointed to themselves with one of them leaving soon, you knew what was going to happen offstage. And then, even more brutally, when the woman returned from their job and crudely scrubbed their crotch from a communal bucket of water, you KNEW the ugliness of their world.
Thank god this play had some humor – most of it brought about by having a copy of a biography of Bill Clinton that one woman is able to read – sort of . . . They are totally confused by the role that Monica Lowensky played in the president’s life and view her simply as Wife #2. It was ironic that a scandal that rocked American politics is less then a stupid blip in the world of these women. Irony!
Act 2 really worked for me. I was very intrigued by the different ways that women could survive in this world – give into the sexual slavery, pick up a gun and join the men, run away, or actually dream of a better tomorrow. But most of all what struck me was the pain these women faced in owning their birth name (they only referred to each other as Wife #1, #2 and so on). To ask one of these woman what their birth name is or, more, who their mother was is to pick a fight that you are likely never to survive.