IN-Festival: Eclipsed
Posted by Adam Immerwahr on December 28th, 2007 Danai Gurira in In The Continuum |
As I mentioned in this previous post, I am trying to detail each of the events in this year’s upcoming IN-Festival so that blog readers get a chance to know what’s coming up. One of the most exciting events is a reading of Danai Gurira’s new play, Eclipsed. Danai’s emergence on the theatrical scene was explosive. With her NYU MFA classmate Nikkole Salter, Danai co-wrote and performed In the Continuum, a two-woman play which was produced by Primary Stages in September, 2005. The play, which dramatizes the devastating problem of HIV/AIDS among African and African-American women, was lauded by the critics. The New York Times’ Charles Isherwood wrote:
“In the Continuum” humanizes the painful stories it has to tell with such emotional vibrancy that the play leaves behind a warm afterglow, of human struggles explored, illumined and embraced.
After an international tour of In the Continuum, Danai traveled to Liberia on a TCG grant, and is now beginning her new play, which tells the story of Liberian female freedom fighters during Charles Taylor’s rule. In Danai’s own words:
The emergence of female rebel fighters (most specifically in Liberia shortly before the end of Charles Taylor’s reign) caught the attention of the global media in 2003. It was in that year that their stories caught my attention, their defiance of the traditional role a woman is expected to play in societies-even during war time-and their agency to take their situations and destinies into their own hands in the face of indescribable hostilities. Their pictures (once on the front of the New York Times) shattered the western concepts of the African woman during wartime-indeed the African woman in general: there they stood, berets cocked to one side, tight-fitted jeans, fashionable slinky tops and permed hair, with AK 47s slung menacingly over one shoulder. The steely stare in each pair of eyes told a million stories. Their voices, though worthy of a global audience, are presently barely audible.
On March 6, 2008, McCarter’s audiences will get a chance to hear Danai’s new play read aloud for the first time. Join us for this free event at the IN-Festival. Tickets are free, but reservations are strongly encouraged.
Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.
