How should America’s theater community respond to humanitarian crises on the other side of the planet? One obvious answer: Just like the rest of us. They can donate to relief agencies, pressure political leaders, stay informed—and, especially since so much of our political art consists of smug, self-righteous choir preaching, leave it at that.
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That said, Northlight’s Eclipsed and TimeLine’s In Darfur don’t have a lot other than topicality and a continent in common. The differences between them make one fact plain: the harder a playwright tries to lecture the audience on the geopolitics behind a catastrophic world event, the smaller the result is likely to seem. Conversely, the more intimate the approach, the bigger the potential bang.
The politics of the first half of the play are distasteful, privileging the travails of the inconvenienced Americans, who dabble in a bit of romantic intrigue over candlelight and contraband Scotch. Their discussions—coupled with Maryka’s fervent efforts to sell her dubious editor on Sudan—provide a tin-eared, expositional review of the crisis. Miller seems to think that a quick lesson in modern African history will somehow make genocide more real to her audience.
Gurira grounds Eclipsed in the specifics of Liberia’s civil war, but her ultimate subject is the larger war on women’s sexuality. After all, if social and legal prohibitions against sexual violence suddenly vanished in Chicago the way they did in Liberia, our town might look a lot like a rebel army camp. Infused with rigorous feminist thinking and amplified through unsparing stagecraft, Gurira’s tiny, tightly focused story achieves an epic scope. Director Hallie Gordon and her astonishing cast make practically every moment of the play vital, exuberant, and devastatingly true.
