promotional photo

Zainab Jah in Danai Gurira's Eclipsed.

Eclipsed

Ends Nov. 14. Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St. $20-$67. 203-432-1234, yalerep.org.

When the sparse two-actor multi-character African AIDS drama In the Continuum played the Yale Rep two years ago, I was one of the minority voices amid the chorus of raves. I found Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter's Obie-winning overnight success to be facile and forced, awkwardly extended to fill a full-length evening of theater, and too showy in how its two authors played all the roles themselves in one of those clichéd attempts at "universalizing" the real-life struggles of disparate people and cultures.

Gurira's new project, Eclipsed, is a whole other story, riskily told in a more conventional set-and-costumes manner, and overall I'm captivated by it. Again, Gurira is dealing with tricky and emotionally extreme material, showing the devastation and disillusionment of life during the savage Liberian Civil War through the tales of a houseful of wives serving the commander of a rebel camp in Bomi County. The women, who are given vibrant individuality through Gurira's gift for compelling, naturalistic dialogue and the touching performances by Pascale Armand, Stacey Sargeant, Adepero Oduye, Zainab Jah and Shona Tucker, must maneuver not only the desperation and outrage that seizes their country but the yoke the misogynistic culture has placed on them.

The drama is about finding identity and purpose in a world that too often seems without hope. It's about keeping the memory of loved ones alive and forming fresh friendships that don't draw you deeper into despair. In its feminist outlook, there are parallels with another expansive contemporary-wartime play by a feminist playwright best known for small-scale works, Eve Ensler's Bosnia-based Necessary Targets, which Hartford Stage presented in 2001. But there are numerous ways that Eclipsed distinguishes itself, both as high drama (with unexpected bursts of high humor via a battered copy of a biography of Bill Clinton) and as reality-based cultural reportage.

There were moments on opening night when I felt suckered, subjected to too heavy-handed handling of subtle material. The bombarding pop-radio music score from the busy theatrical sound design ensemble Broken Chord Collective seems to head in the wrong direction — we're getting inside these women's heads, not lost in the chaos around them — and the obligatory machine-gun blasts that punctuate the battle scenes don't add shock value, just noise. And there are certainly areas where the play goes overboard in showing us how alien this culture is from our own despite happening just a few years ago in a place our country has diplomatic relations with.

But Gurira and director Liesl Tommy — with an important assist from dialogue coach Beth McGuire, since the strong Liberian accents and phrasings help ground the realism here — seem to implicitly understand that their story has to stand on its own, not as an overblown "we're all in this together" parable that In the Continuum became.

Drawn from the playwright's interviews with actual participants in the Liberian Civil War (a four-year struggle that ended with the ousting of its warlord president Charles Taylor in 2003), but usefully infused with stagecraft, Eclipsed doesn't need metaphor, or convenient comparisons with our own country's politics or even all that much empathy, to make it work. Its raw material is as tragic and dramatic as anything the Greeks had to work with, and just as modern in its sympathy for the lost female voices in a sexist culture during a revolutionary struggle.