Yale Rep’s “Eclipsed” Deploys Easy Psychology at the Expense of Ethics

by ANNIE ATURA

Decem­ber 2009

Eclipsed is an excru­ci­at­ing tear­jerker, which sug­gests that play­wright Danai Gurira felt an urgency of mes­sage.  Yet it’s also an adamant pur­veyor of futil­ity and moral ver­tigo. Gurira says, “I went to Liberia to allow the women who endured a treach­er­ous war to speak to me and even­tu­ally through me.” This claim is dis­turb­ing enough in itself, but its pre­sump­tion is com­pounded by the play’s shallowness.

The play­wright evades moral judg­ment by pro­vid­ing facile pop-psychology expla­na­tions for each woman’s pro­cliv­ity for extreme jeal­ousy, com­pas­sion, and fear.  Why are the wives depicted so bewil­dered and vul­ner­a­ble?  Well, each of them has been raped, each of them has been forcibly sep­a­rated from her fam­ily, and each of them has, through yet another rape, become the de facto wife of a gen­eral. Who can blame them, then, for any clichéd neu­roses they have devel­oped? The women are laugh­ably par­a­dig­matic, sus­pi­ciously dis­tinct, like sit­com char­ac­ters. Each is a walk­ing case study in deal­ing with the aggres­sor, and as such they func­tion as a man­i­fes­ta­tion of the playwright’s mus­ings, not as a way of ques­tion­ing them.  The play is a snap­shot, not a story.

The women are laugh­ably par­a­dig­matic, sus­pi­ciously dis­tinct, like sit­com char­ac­ters. Each is a walk­ing case study in deal­ing with the aggressor…

None of the women por­trayed prove capa­ble of see­ing their abuse as a prod­uct any­thing but fate. Yet they recite pat affir­ma­tions of love to one another, which pass for insight in the con­text of the play.  We are meant to believe that the women have been totally closed down by their cir­cum­stan­tial dom­i­na­tion, and also to believe that they lead richly emo­tional lives. They are appar­ently inca­pable of see­ing men as peo­ple, but also inca­pable of self­ish­ness. None of them has the least bit of trou­ble with uneth­i­cal behav­ior in the abstract, but each leaps to love when pre­sented with a strug­gling crea­ture in the flesh. Why do they con­tinue to respond pre­dictably to emo­tional stim­uli?  The expo­si­tion of each woman’s story reaf­firms the playwright’s appar­ent con­vic­tion that only the sen­ti­men­tal, fem­i­nine attach­ment to cute babies and mamas is capa­ble of end­ing the cycle of violence.

The con­ceit of the play is in itself prob­lem­atic.  Four women are stuck in a com­pound in the ser­vice of a war­lord for whom they act as “wives” for the dura­tion of the war.  No man enters the stage; we meet only these four wives, together with a very wom­anly and bizarrely calm peace­keeper who blows onto the scene unex­plained.  The absence of men is prob­a­bly the most telling aspect of the play.  The play­wright excludes the dom­i­neer­ing men to enhance the audience’s rela­tion­ship to the women, who exist in a her­met­i­cally sealed uni­verse and pur­port­edly under­stand one another more deeply than the men in their lives ever could. Yet this sep­a­ra­tion high­lights not only the men’s fail­ure to under­stand the women, but the women’s utter lack of effort in mak­ing them­selves under­stood to the men who con­trol them.  The wives spend the play wav­ing their arms and squawk­ing at one another in a crude, accented Eng­lish.  They yelp about vio­lence and injus­tice in an embar­rass­ingly essen­tial­ized “com­pound” in which even the direc­tor has trou­ble find­ing excuses to keep their hands busy.

The char­ac­ters’ only hope, their only eth­i­cal touch­stone, is their quin­tes­sen­tial and unremit­ting mater­nal instinct…

The human rights abuses com­mit­ted against these women are plainly repug­nant.  The women’s moti­va­tions are made embar­rass­ingly trans­par­ent (not all inse­cu­ri­ties are so sim­ply accounted for), and cer­tainly aren’t selec­tively opaque to men.  The play­wright pre­sup­poses that women must work exclu­sively with one another, because inter­ac­tion with men may only be under­taken on men’s terms.  This premise ren­ders any broader effort on the women’s part futile; they are at their best com­fort­ing one another and stand­ing in the way of the guns.  The play implies that men are dumb and soul­less, the per­pe­tra­tors of evil, shells of humans with fright­en­ing penises pro­trud­ing.  They won’t stop rap­ing our daugh­ters until women find a way to stop them. If so, it’s under­stand­able that the women may only respond by com­pro­mis­ing either their integrity or their phys­i­cal safety.

The char­ac­ters’ only hope, their only eth­i­cal touch­stone, is their quin­tes­sen­tial and unremit­ting mater­nal instinct: the stoic elder takes care of the other wives, the peace­keeper is actu­ally moti­vated by a search for her kid­napped daugh­ter, the chatty air­head actu­ally has a baby, and the new­comer aban­dons sol­dier­ing because she can’t bear to watch her com­rades rape enemy girls. Only one woman isn’t look­ing out for lit­tle ones: the evil, brain­washed con­vert to the dark side, a bony woman who wears the col­ors of Old Glory, quotes Tupac, and unabashedly “loves on” cer­tain pow­er­ful men in order to curry favor.  The play offers women as a bea­con of hope only because of their pri­mal impulse to keep peace in the hearth.  This impulse is cute or mov­ing, and there were plenty of snif­fles and bravoes in the seats around me.  Yet nur­tur­ing shouldn’t be prof­fered as some anti­dote to mas­culin­ity. Rather, it should be con­sid­ered merely human.  Empa­thy is merely human. And, above all, instinct should not func­tion as a last-ditch stand-in for ethics– much less when that instinct is exclu­sively and prob­lem­at­i­cally attrib­uted to one sex.

Annie Atura is a junior in Yale Col­lege.