ECLIPSED starring Lupita Nyong'o on Bwy

ECLIPSED by playwright Danai Gurira (b. Amer rasied in Zimbabwe) is a gripping & distubing drama depicting the terrors and savagery of war.  ECLIPSED encapsalates the calamities from the Liberian Civil Wars (1989-96 & 1999-2003.)  Gurira focus is on the women as victims of war loads & soldiers; torn from their families and forced into sexual servitude.  Some women chose to take-up arms as fighters rather than being victimized. These women in turn become killers & oppressors.  The play centers around a household of women.  The women were all abducted from their families and now form a family of concubines for a war load.  There's a hierachy amongst the women.  Wife #1 rules the roost over successive wives.  The set is a delapitated hovel and begins with The Girl (Acad Award winner Lupita Nyong'o) captive arrival.  The Girl is disoriented & despondent having been obducted from her parents.  She finds her plight abhorrent but finds comforte from the maternal attentions of Wife #1 & companionship of Wife #3.  Wife #3 is close in age and brings a liveliness to their forced circumstances.  The Girl is literate and reads to the 2 wives about Pres Clinton and his affair with Monica Lewinsky.  There is comic relief in their bafflement as to how the affair is viewed by Mrs Clinton & the American public.  Needless to say, this is an intense drama depicting the horrors of war.  Wife #2 chose to take up arms & empower herself.  Wife #2 returns & manipulates The Girl into joining her on the battlefront.  The Girl's epiphany to her new role is harrowing.  There is a counter balance to the Hell of war from Rita, a representative in the council of women negotiating peace.  ECLIPSED is brilliantly written, deftly acted anti-war play that is worth seeing.  But, the realities of this play overshadows its dramatic achievement.