HOW DANAI GURIRA MADE HISTORY ON BROADWAY WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM LUPITA

A repost from 2016

Gurira's political drama is
the first Broadway play 

written by, 

directed by, 

and starring women 

-- and black women at that 

The play ECLIPSED was written by Danai Gurira star of television's THE WALKING DEAD.

Inspired by a news story about a real black female rebel soldier called "Black Diamond," Gurira's story follows the paths four women during the Liberian Civil War.

A brief description From Amazon

"It’s best to work with the system, and right now – the system is war.

In 2003, civil war is raging in Liberia. At a rebel army base four young women are doing their best to survive the conditions of the war. Yet sometimes, the greatest threat comes not from the enemy’s guns, but from the brutality of those on your own side. With the arrival of a new girl, who can read, and an old one, who can kill, how might this transform the future of this hard-bitten sisterhood?

Gurira's plays have been around for a while. And one of them played in Los Angeles in 2009. The fact that this play ECLIPSED is still around and Lupita Nyong'o decided she wanted to be in it bad enough to be part of an ensemble cast instead of a in a play where she could be a headliner --due to that Oscar in her pocket-- speaks volumes as to the quality of this play.

The play opened on Sunday, March 6 2016. I was able to see it in May of the same year.

Until I started researching what ECLIPSED was about, I didn't realize that I'd seen another of Gurira's plays years earlier when she wasn't famous.  Her Obie Award winning play IN THE CONTINUUM is about black women and AIDS in Africa.

When I first started realizing I wanted to tell stories from an African female perspective, I felt pretty lonely out there,” Ms. Gurira said. “I had to be like a mad scientist and have the hypothesis that if I put a multidimensional narrative about an African woman in front of a Western audience.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/theater/african-plays-danai-guirira-jocelyn-bioh.html 

IN THE CONTINUUM showed me a relatively recent world where the social power of women was so low in the 1990s and early 2000s that a black woman in country X in Africa could get AIDS from her husband, yet automatically be the one blamed for bring AIDS into the household. Then this wife would be labeled as a cheating whore.

 As I recall, all of this was entirely due to men's status being so much greater than women's 

The wife's whore status could lead to death as this status could stop her getting the little treatment that might have been available for AIDS patients at the time.

Danai Gurira is truly a black girl that rocks. And this is why she won an award at BLACK GIRLS ROCK in 2016 and gave an awesome speech. And I hope you got to check out her acting skills in BLACK PANTHER.

An interview with Danai and Lupita is here at the link below, an awesome photo is located there too

http://www.ew.com/article/2016/02/26/lupita-nyongo-danai-gurira-ew


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