Preview Thoughts on Familiar and Eclipsed

I've been counting the minutes until I can see Danai Gurira's Eclipsed, because I really regretted missing it at the Public, and I was also excited to catch her other play, Familiar, Off-Broadway.  So when I got discount offers for BOTH, I pounced!  I had to!  I was afraid that once the plays were reviewed, no more tickets would be available.  I saw early previews of both, so I'll just offer thoughts (even though both plays have had previous productions)...

Last week, my gorgeous co-worker and I headed over to Playwrights Horizons to see Familiar. The play tells a, yes, familiar family story about the upheaval a wedding can cause.  Because this family is originally from Africa, that only highlights the universality of the specific issues. Love when that happens.  But the stakes are heightened by the clash of cultures between the more modern American customs and the more old-world Zimbabwean cultures inside the family. Even though the problems are somewhat expected, Gurira's characters, dialogue and situations were wonderfully idiosyncratic.  I'd never seen a story quite like this one, with twists and turns throughout, but the characters were so relatable and real.

photo credit: Joan Marcus

Nyasha, the younger daughter of affluent Minneapolis couple Donald and Marvelous, has just returned from a trip to Zimbabwe, where her family came from.  It's clear she has reservations about being home and her parents have reservations about her free spirit and career in the arts.  All of the bickering could be from any family anywhere.  Once Nyasha's older sister, Tendi, arrives, all bets are off.  Tendi seems to be everything Nyasha is not: confident, successful and certain of herself.  She is the one getting married, to a white man, and they have decided to participate in an ancient African pre-marital ceremony.  Their auntie Anne comes from Zimbabwe to perform the ceremony - it's revealed that Marvelous didn't want her sister to attend and is completely against the ceremony.  So we have the conflict between the sisters Nyasha and Tendi, the conflict between the sisters Marvelous and Anne, and the conflict between the generations.  Even Chris, Tendi's fiancé, has conflict with his brother, Brad, who is invited to participate in the ceremony.

If that sounds like a lot of plot, it kind of is.  And that's really just the first act.  The play, up to this point, is pretty much a comedy.  There is a riotous curtain-dropping moment at the end of Act One that was completely unexpected, hilarious and totally right.  Then the second act takes a different turn and we find out deep, long-hidden secrets of the family that weren't even hinted at in the first act.  So the turn in tone, and the plot changes, were a little abrupt and felt maybe a little tacked on.  It was hard to figure out whose story Familiar was: each character had so much going on, that each one took a turn in the spotlight, then stepped aside to support the next.  Although I appreciated the juggling of stories, I did feel things were maybe a little unfocused.  Perhaps that's because it was only the second or third preview.

I did think the dialogue was very clever and rich and the acting was first-rate.  I was quite moved at the end, as well.  I enjoyed myself, though I did have some reservations about the play itself.   My seat neighbor, on the other hand, did not.  He laughed uproariously at everything, even stuff that probably wasn't supposed to get a laugh.  It was as if he read this was a rollicking comedy and gosh darn it, he was going to respond that way!  It was a little odd.  But I was glad to have seen Familiar and it only made me look forward to Eclipsed even more.

After actress Lupita Nyong'o won her Oscar for 12 Years a Slave, she could've had her pick of any project.  She chose to return to the stage in a play for which she'd been an understudy while she was a student at Yale.  It's probably safe to say that Eclipsed wouldn't have gotten a New York production without her involvement.  She should be proud she helped bring this important story to the stage.

Set in 2003 during the Liberian conflict, Eclipsed tells the story of five women who are somehow trying to retain their humanity even while being brutalized and systematically erased by the degradation that goes on around them.  When the play begins, we see two women sitting in a ramshackle hut, the older doing the younger's hair.  Suddenly, a very young girl bounces out from under a plastic tub - she is being hidden so that the "CO" won't take her on as another 'wife'.  The older woman is Wife #1, the other woman is pregnant and Wife #3.  The young girl, referred to as The Girl in the playbill and played by Lupita Nyong'o, becomes Wife #4 because she made the mistake of going outside the hut to go to the bathroom - while she was out there, she was raped by the CO and made into one of his 'wives'.  It's harrowing stuff, yet, the way the woman protect and encourage each other is incredible.  It's so beautiful to be reminded of the way sisterhood and motherhood can transcend nearly anything.  The women do each other's hair, try on discarded clothes, reassure Wife #3 that she will not be raising her unborn child alone.  The Girl still has a naivete and innocence about her - she dreams of a career and using her book learning.  There is a lot of humor and affection in these scenes in the hut, even while the horror is going on outside.  A running joke has The Girl reading from the only book available to them: a tattered copy of Bill Clinton's autobiography.  Listening to the women try to parse out Clinton's life in government and the sexual scandals was very amusing (they even refer to Monica Lewinsky as "#2").  But then every few minutes, a light will shine off stage, the women will stand up in a line, and one of them will be selected to have sex with the CO.  There is a basin with water and rags by the door so they can clean up after every encounter.  So we always know that the lightheartedness in their lives is very finite.

Because #1 (part of the poignancy of the script is that each woman has either forgotten or repressed her real name, because she doesn't want to remember who she was before this sad situation, she would rather keep her head above water to survive and they all refer to each other by number) is a little bit older, and because #3 is pregnant and getting bigger every day, The Girl/#4 gets called on more and more for sex with the CO.  She begins losing her hope, her spark and liveliness - then one day, the girl who formerly was Wife #2 arrives, carrying a rifle and a bag of rice.  She has escaped being a sex slave for the CO and has begun fighting with the rebels.  She tries to talk The Girl into joining her, instead of staying behind in the hut.  The rest of the play is rather a tug of war for The Girl's soul.  The Girl decides that she cannot let the CO have his way with her whenever he wants and former Wife #2 convinces her that she will have power over herself if she joins the rebels.  The first act ends with The Girl deciding to leave the hut to join #2 (who now calls herself Disgruntled).

photo credit: Sara Krulwich

I enjoyed the lived-in quality of the first act, how we were just thrown into these lives and we lived them alongside the characters.  There was a deliberateness to the pacing, perhaps so we could fully know and appreciate the futility of the women's lives.  I did think the first act was a little too long, though, it currently runs about an hour and twenty minutes, which did start to seem too much by the end of the act.  The second act is shorter and infinitely more brutal.  The Girl sees that her choice to become a rebel was not without more inhumanity - the scene when she discovers she's going to have to give other girls to the rebel fighters as sex slaves if she doesn't want to become one is horrifying.  Later, her monologue about the gang rape and murder of another young girl is simply harrowing.  The response from #2/Disgruntled is even more harrowing. 

photo credit: Joan Marcus

I mentioned that the story was about five women - the fifth woman is Rita, a member of the women's council who is advocating for peace.  Rita also has a secret and when we discover it at the end of the play...shattering.  She always asks the other women what their real name is, the name their mother gave them, as if she's trying to give back the lives the women once had.  How she engages with them and ends up in their final choices is quite beautiful.  And not. 

Eclipsed is very powerful, scary, threatening and oh so sad.  I was sobbing at the end and could barely see or hear what was going on.  And the last image was terrifically haunting.  I will admit to already finding stories about young women in the middle of war so sad and moving, so I guess this play was in my wheelhouse.  But I thought it was really smartly put together and movingly acted by the entire cast.  I also have to admit that I was thrilled to see both Familiar and Eclipsed were directed by women - not that only women can tell women's stories written by women, but I'm happy to see more women get the chance.  That's all.  I was also happy to see a really diverse audience last night; for once, I wasn't one of the youngest people in the room, and all of the faces around me didn't look much like mine.  I appreciated that.  I highly recommend both plays, though maybe I found Eclipsed the tiniest bit more satisfying theatrically, but they are both so worth your time and money.  Oh, but a word of warning, if you're picking up your tickets at the box office, do not get to the theater less than 30 minutes prior to curtain.  There's only one line for both the box office and to enter the theater, plus there are people checking bags on your way in.  I stood in line for quite some time and it was pretty confusing and rather a mess out there.  Again, it was maybe because I was there for an early preview and they haven't quite figured things out yet.  But if you're like me and want to be in your seat in plenty of time before the curtain, don't dawdle.  A tip from me to you.  :)