12 Years A Slave Star Lupita Nyong’o Takes the Broadway Stage

By Claire Del Sorbo

Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o tugged at the heart strings of audiences in her harrowing performance as the young slave girl, Patsey, in 12 Years a Slave. It made us weep for the former state of the world and how Africans and African-Americans have endured so much injustice over the course of their history. It was upsetting, shocking and, in a way, empowering.

Her performance in “Eclipsed” on Broadway is not much different. In a drama written by Danai Gurira, better known to most as Michonne on “The Walking Dead,” and directed by Liesl Tommy, Nyong’o portrays a nameless woman, simply referred to as “the Girl,” who represents the face of all the women who endured the hardships of the Liberian Civil Wars.

The play is set in Liberia sometime in the late 1990s, taking place in a sparsely furnished room where four women live to serve as sex slaves to a commanding officer of a rebel faction. They sleep on thin sheets and survive on irregular meals. Their one purpose is to sleep with the commanding officer, commonly known as the C.O., and his soldiers.

They have names, but they refer to themselves and each other as what their captor assigns them: usually numbers such as “Wife Number One” or “Number One,” serving as a powerful symbol of their dehumanization, made even more apparent by their self-alienation.

Helena, the first wife (Saycon Sengbloh), is the maternal figure of the brothel. Bessie (Pascale Armand), the third wife, is a cheerful woman carrying a baby. Maima (Zainab Jah), the second wife, has disappeared from the camp to join the rebels.

When Nyong’o’s character, the Girl, wanders into the camp after fleeing violence in her own village, two of the women attempt to hide her in a rubber tub. Much to their horror, the C.O. discovers her, rapes her and effectively makes her the fourth wife.

The plot revolves around the Girl’s decision to either remain complacent in her oppression as a wife of the C.O., like the two remaining wives have done, or to forge her own destiny and become a soldier like Maima. She is naive, young and unsophisticated, but she is not dumb.

She understands that, in this society, women are the first to experience the man-made horrors of war, since they are politically powerless. However, she realizes that they must draw upon moral assets such as strength, dignity and compassion to counter the senseless violence caused by the wars without giving up their humanity.

While Gurira makes the Girl’s fate at the end of the play unknown, she leaves with a message that encourages women to defend their honor and rights not only as humans, but as women, a message that is empowering for all women – especially women of color. “Eclipsed” magnifies the adversities faced by Liberian women.

Its recent place and time serves as a disturbingly grim reminder that we still have a long way to go in order to achieve equality for women, not only in the Western world, but everywhere.