Eclipsed

by Danai Gurira

 “[ Eclipsed is] a surprisingly vivacious portrait of helplessness, of the entirely human impulse to adapt, to get by even when there's little hope life will get better.”— Washington Post “ Eclipsed depicts the harsh realities of women’s lives in a strife-torn African country with both a clear eye and a palpable empathy.”— New York Times Four women in Liberia struggle to survive conditions on a rebel army base. Held as the concubines of a warlord, each “wife” must find her own means of coping amidst a situation that appears hopeless. With frail, fractured identities born from an ongoing, senseless civil war, the women build their own contained world to guard against the chaos outside. This enthralling work from award-winning playwright and actress Gurira demonstrates the human capacity to endure, even in the most desolate of circumstances. Danai Gurira ’s other plays include Familiar and In the Continuum , written for World AIDS Day in December 2011, which she co-wrote and co-starred in with Nikkole Salter. For In the Continuum , she was awarded an Obie Award, Outer Critics' Circle Award, and a Helen Hayes Award for her performance. She received a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2012. She is best known for her role as Michonne in the hit television series, The Walking Dead .

Genres: Plays, Theatre, Historical Fiction, Drama, Fiction, School, Africa

82 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 31, 2010

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars
Eclipsed is a play by Danai Gurira. As well as being a playwright, she is also an actress, having had parts in The Walking Dead and Black Panther. It is set during the second Liberian civil war in 2003 and has an all-female cast of five. Four of them are wives of the commanding officer of the camp. Wife one Helena, wife two Maima, wife three Bessie and wife four the girl. The fifth character is Rita who works for a peace organisation. The play is written in dialect, but it isn’t difficult to pick up and follow. The wives and essentially chattels and sexual objects to be used. Gurira’s purpose was to illuminate those that are obscured by war; not the men, but the women and at the same time to look at the sisterhood between the women and how they survive. The title indicates that the women are the ones who are eclipsed/obscured. It is an analysis of the tyranny of war seen through the eyes of the five women, living with their own tensions and their own sisterhood. The play focuses on women’s lives, but male power is never far away.
Eclipsed was the first all-black, all-female play on Broadway. It is a play and it is meant to be performed, so reading it doesn’t feel quite right, but I suspect it is a while before we will all be sitting in theatres again!

[Ashley Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Til a year or so ago, I was only familiar with Danai as an actor thanks to The Walking Dead (yes, even though I've still never watched it). She was my favorite part of Black Panther too. But to know that she's also a playwright and has written multiple plays... I'm definitely checking them all out. This one really consumed me, in part thanks to the dialect used. It reminded me a bit of Scottish English, that is, you can basically hear the accent when you read the words as written. Really cool. The story was something else. I was unaware of any war in Liberia; honestly, my only knowledge of Liberia was that it was a country in Africa created for freed slaves to have somewhere to go if they didn't want to stay in the US. Time to go learn!

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I would have found this more powerful if I hadn't already seen/read Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer winning 'Ruined', which covers similar territory. I am sure this plays quite well (as the reviews for the current Broadway production attest), but reading it, it just seemed rather pedestrian.

[Andrew Dittmar · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Hi Goodreads! I've never published a review on here before, so my apologies if this is a bit rough!)

For those who don't know, Danai Gurira is an actress with such credits as The Walking Dead and Black Panther, but she's also a published playwright! Pretty awesome, I think!

Anyway, to my mind, a star rating is hard (and almost meaningless) to assign to a play of any kind. Plays are meant to be performed and/or viewed, and it's hard to judge on the script alone. Some playwrights write stage direction so thoroughly and descriptively that it feels more traditionally literary (like, say, Eugene O'Neill in Long Day's Journey into Night , another play I recently finished). Danai Gurira's directions, though, are appropriate, but not elaborate.

Eclipsed is a powerful story about women surviving in a world where women are more property than human. Prior to reading this, my knowledge with Liberia's political history was virtually non-existent. Gurira's story is situated at the end of the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. This bloody four-and-a-half year conflict is the bedrock of the play's storyline, though the play doesn't spend time explaining war's ins and outs. The action of the war is entirely off-stage; this is really a play about women, not a play about war.

Eclipsed is focused on five characters. Helena and Bessie are both the concubinal "wives" of a commanding officer of a rebel militia, living within the rebel army camp. Both were kidnapped as a part of the spoils of war, and take turns having sex with the commander at his will. Helena is wife #1, and has attained some authority because of that status; though it may be fading, Helena is the wife who still maintains some hope for life beyond the war. Bessie, wife #3, is pregnant, but unable to imagine life beyond the war. When the play opens, these two women are helping to care for a young new abductee, a bright girl with some education behind her. The new wife, only ever referred to as The Girl, shortly becomes a part of the commanding officer's rotation. Shortly after the Girl's arrival, wife #2, Maima, returns to the camp from battle. Maima's relationship with Helena and Bessie is tense and complicated. Maima has found strength and purpose in the war as a soldier, unsettling Bessie and Helena. Soon, Maima begins to try to court the Girl to join her in battle, leaving the Girl torn between her potential options. Meanwhile, another woman named Rita arrives in the camp. Rita works for the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace (a real organization that was founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee), and comes to try and establish peace and offer hope to women like the wives. The play's narrative ultimately brings each of the five in conflict with one another as they try to determine how to respond to the war and to each other.

Almost every line in the play is written in dialect, which makes it virtually impossible to read the play without imagining how an actress could really shape each role into a dynamic performance. The play's casting history supports that idea. The premiere production of Eclipsed in Washington, D.C. in 2009 included a pre-Orange is the New Black Uzo Aduba as Helena. The play's original Broadway production boasted Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o as the Girl, as well as Saycon Sengbloh (who the first woman of color to play the role of Elphaba in Wicked in 2005) as Helena; both women received Tony Award nominations. The Broadway production was also the first play with an all-black and female cast and creative team, making it a striking and important Broadway first.

I have to say, though, it was almost impossible for me to review this without often thinking about Lynn Nottage's Ruined . Such a comparison isn't exactly fair - Ruined is among favorite works, full-stop, and Nottage is my favorite contemporary playwright - but the two works do share a fair amount of common ground. Both are stories of the ways women survive in dehumanizing wars; both primarily present young, complicated women who find ways to cope and try to find meaning in their positions in life; both are highly sex-adjacent (Ruined takes place in a bar-brothel, Eclipsed is centered around what amounts to a concubine); and both are ultimately demonstrate how woman find agency in situations that usually don't acknowledge women's agency.

Unfortunately, I think Eclipsed is the lesser of the two works. I think Nottage's characters are on the whole more dynamic, and richly imagined; for much Eclipsed, Gurira's characters feel more like caricatures than fully-realized women. And while Ruined kind of revels in the messiness and chaos of war, Eclipsed feels a bit more episodic and constrained. Of course, I have no idea what that might look like onstage, and the play's New York reviews suggest it was wildly successful in its mission and execution, so it's entirely possible (even probable) that my perceptions are inaccurate.

I do heartily recommend this read. There is one monologue in the final pages of the play that really, really hit me. In it, with a kind of bewildered horror, the Girl recounts the wartime atrocities she has witnessed and taken part in. While I don't think Eclipsed is entirely successful as a written work, the monologue is particularly striking because it is a powerful reminder that the lives in this play are lives that have been lived by real women, lives that I have never had to consider in a part of the world that so much of the rest of the world would rather ignore. You can't help close the book with a bit of appreciation, and more than a bit of fear and horror. We're only fifteen years separate from this exact conflict, and others like it - for example, the Boko Haram kidnappings - are even more recent. And while we might claim solidarity on social media when those kinds of things happen (#bringbackourgirls) it's hard to imagine what it really must be like for those who can't look away. Eclipsed tries to show just that, in all its complicated horror.

[Arielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

2024 Reading Challenge - Eclipsed: A Play (War=Horror)

2017 Reading Challenge - a novel set during wartime

This play is set during the Liberian civil war between LURD and Charles Taylor. It is an all female cast, Helena, Bessie, Maima, Rita and "The Girl". Each woman's story educates us on different aspects of the experience of war by women. Helena is guarded but hopeful, Bessie seems devoid of any real knowledge of life outside of war, Maima finds strength in war, Rita desperately wants peace and "The Girl" is fractured between her desire to escape this life and her pragmatic choices. It, of course, considering the topic, a heart wrenching story, but it is done incredibly well, so that it is truly experiential versus melodramatic. I recommend it.

[Francesca Calarco · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I did not get to see it during its Broadway or Off-Broadway runs, "Eclipsed" was amazing to read. The play takes place in 2003 during the Second Liberian Civil War and is told from the perspectives of five women. Four of the women are "wives" of a LURD (Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy) general, and the fifth woman is a representative of the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace.

The play is really great in large part because of its characters. In the face of horror, each woman responds to her circumstances in the best way she thinks will allow for survival, physically and mentally. These responses at times puts them at odds with each other. As events escalate and the tension builds, I found myself superbly invested in all of their fates.

I will admit, this play came on my radar because I saw "Black Panther" this weekend and am now suffering from withdrawal. Like any nerd, I went and researched all of the projects that Danai Gurira and Lupita Nyong'o have completed. Once I realized Danai wrote a play that Lupita stared in, I knew reading it was a done deal. All that aside, the play is great on its own. I recommend it, and will be sure to get a ticket if it has another Broadway/Off-Broadway run regardless of who is cast.

[Rebekah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5? I'm not sure about it.

Truth be told, I know absolutely nothing about the Second Liberian Civil War and was instead drawn to this play because I know the playwright from her role on The Walking Dead and the fact that this play was the first to have a Broadway premiere with an all black and female cast and creative team.

This play is written in Liberian English but I didn't have any trouble understanding the words on the page (the playwright's notes in the back of this edition also detail the lengths the creative team went to in order to ensure all audiences could understand this dialect when spoken as well).

Eclipsed is very character driven, and as a reader, I prefer plot driven narratives that happen to have well developed characters who have character arcs that go along with the plot. Eclipsed is about the stories of these women fighting for survival, and their interpersonal relationships and histories are the main focus of the play. This play didn't resonate with me as much as I thought it might, maybe because I'm unfamiliar with the conflict that looms over this play. I still liked it, but it didn't blow me away.

[Laura Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 'Eclipsed,' playwright Danai Gurira uses the experiences of her character, The Girl, to depict a war-torn, antimoral world in which the only semblance of choice a woman has is to survive in any way she can. The Girl’s choices throughout the play are often informed not only by the civil war ravaging her country but also by the women who are desperate to protect her in what each woman believes to be the best way. Each woman is, in a sense, a different product of the war in which they live. The choices they ‘make,’ the names they ‘choose,’ none of it is theirs, but yet it becomes them, redefines them. Despite the difference in each woman’s choice—and given what little agency they possess—none can be judged for the path on which they choose to embark because as long as they are surviving, they are making the best decision possible. War has stripped these women of their names, their consciences, and, worst of all, their ability to truly choose for themselves because the only choice a woman has in the context of war is to survive in whatever way she can.

[Cameron Krogh Stone · Rating 4 out of 5]

A simultaneously heartwarming and gut-wrenching tale of life as a rebel army wife in civil war Liberia. This is the first play to have made me lightheaded and want to vomit from the brutality of the horrors depicted, added to which it also managed to make me laugh on several occasions. The references to American politics and popular culture provide fascinating and funny reading, as well as some startling contrast and perspective. This truly does feel like an important play in those respects, and can be compared to the more recent "Beasts of No Nation" starring Idris Elba as a coming-of-age & loss-of-innocence African civil war piece. Highly recommend, but be prepared to need to lie down for a moment to send the blood back to your head at one point...

[dawson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Danai Gurira, whether intentionally or not, reminds us that the horrors our world faced over two decades ago still linger, effectively haunting us the moment we step outside our doors. While this play takes place during the 2003 Liberian Civil War, the characters we see are no less reflective of our own mothers, sisters, and daughters who, in one way or another, find themselves caught in the midst of political warfare. Through her haunting dialogue, which provides exact pronunciations of the characters’ accents, Gurira had me reeling for these girls whose choices would lead them in one direction or another. And I promise that no matter which way they move, you can’t blame them. You can only feel for them.

[Jorie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The greatest measure of a play, I think, is when its voice speaks out even without being performed. The characters in Danai Gurira's Eclipsed are so full and real that when each woman spoke, I not only heard her distinctly, but knew her.

This play is an excellent examination of war and womanhood, and the different paths women take for some semblance of personal freedom. It is both succinct and complex, exhilarating and heartbreaking. I will remember The Girl, Helena, Bessie, Maima, and Rita for a long, long time.

[Ines · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. I have never read a play before, but I picked this up for the Reading Woman 2019 Challenge, and it really surprised me! It's a powerful story about four women during the 2003 civil war in Libreria. It's written in a dialect which makes this play even more impressive. You hear the words in your head while reading it and I could see it happen on a stage. Would not have read this without the Reading Woman Challenge, highly recommend this play, and the challenge.

[Erikka · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful play written in dialect about five women during the fight for Liberian Independence. I was impressed with the deep character development in only 80 pages. Like any play, I think this would be better to see performed, but I liked it nonetheless. I laughed as they were trying to figure out the Clinton book and was very sad at the end. I think this would be an excellent addition to an English class discussion.

[Kylie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Content Warnings: war, sexual assault/violence, graphic descriptions of rape/violence.

Eclipsed is a wonderfully constructed play with a horrible subject matter. I think it is something quite special to read these women speaking about their experiences in their own dialect, and I would love the opportunity to see it performed and hear it spoken correctly. It is a simple, but effective structure that allows the women and their lives to be the focus. Very well done.

[Ctroskoph · Rating 3 out of 5]

I saw the play on Broadway and loved it. Usually I am good reading plays that I have seen and often find that I like reading them better than the production. I can spend time over lines and appreciate the symbolism and metaphors more. That was not the case with Eclipsed. The dialogue was diificult and the characters did not seem to come to life for me on the page like they did on the stage. I will definitely see this again but will not read it again.

[Gretta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before reading this play, I saw a traveling production of it at the Curran in San Francisco. It was wonderfully staged and the acting was beautiful. Reading it a second time, I was struck by its depth and tragedy. The characters are beautifully complicated and by the end there is a real sense of knowing them.

[Si Squires-Kasten · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the characters in Lynn Nottage’s “Ruined” feel nuanced and singular, changing over the course of the play, the women here feel like predictable stereotypes. Also the irony of “Liberian women consider American politics” never materializes into something more.

[Roman Colombo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly Powerful

I hope I get to see this on stage someday. Aurora is an amazing storyteller and her characters are brilliantly complex. Even just reading the play, it is deeply moving. On stage it must be even more emotionally charged.

[Alessia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this! An exploration of womanhood and war. It surprised me in the many humorous moments it had, considering you don't anticipate that when picking up a play about war in Liberia. I would love to see this staged.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

A little bleak, even for my taste. And it was written in broken English which was not the most pleasant to read. While I have no doubt that this is an important story to be told, it just wasn’t for me at this point.

[Zachary Pareizs · Rating 4 out of 5]

What’s in a name?

The feminist context of Liberian history and what follows the civil war certainly add great meaning.

Edit: now that I’ve read Ruined by Lynn Nottage, I’ve got to say any and all comparisons, especially those dismissive of this play are so reductive. Analysis on the level of “hurdurdur play about women in war in Africa same.”

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional and brutal. A complex analysis of the intersection of women - specifically Liberian women embroiled in a second civil war - and the cruelty of war.

[Vanessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh wow! This book/play was so simple yet so complex. Speechless... such a poignant story.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a powerful look at the different roles women must play in order to survive during wartime. Thrilled to have gotten my hands on this script.

[Mike Schuh · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best plays that I have read in a long time! Gripping and heartbreaking!

[Dylan Groves · Rating 3 out of 5]

by okoye!

[Not Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Play.

[George Saba · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Fefe · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

[melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This play was very moving and a great, short read. The play is not written in traditional English vernacular, so it can be difficult to follow at times, other than that I would recommend this play.