It’s “Torture” to Watch Non-Africans Play Africans, says SA-Born Director

The Cape Town-born director of a play written by a Zimbabwean and starring an Oscar-winning Kenyan for a prestigious New York theatre has told a U.S. newspaper that she was adamant about having African actresses in the play and that it was very difficult for her to watch non-Africans play Africans.

“We see a lot of depictions of ourselves that are just not accurate,” Liesl Tommy told the The New York Times.

“This is going to be controversial, but it’s torture for me to watch a lot of non-African people who play Africans. There’s just so much that is affected. It’s a Western idea of what African-ness is. It’s often a very general idea, which to me is death.”

The play at the esteemed Public Theatre in New York is ‘Eclipsed’, a story of women set in a brutal Liberia, written by Zimbabwean Danai Gurira (who also acts in the popular ‘Walking Dead’ TV series) and starring Oscar winner Lupita Nyongo’o of ’12 Years a Slave’.

The three women first worked on a production of the play at Yale University in 2009, according to the paper.

“It was done twice in South Africa, it was done in Zimbabwe. It was just done in London,” Gurira said. “But New York is the mecca, and it never got to touch here.”

Referring to the fact that four of the five actresses had direct African roots, Tommy said she was adamant about wanting to look for African actresses.

She said, “I think with this play what we’re teaching folks is that there are plenty of interesting stories that happen on the vast continent of Africa, and that you can relate to them without seeing yourself, your race, or a version of yourself in it.”

“The most fun part of doing this play is how much we laugh in the rehearsal room, how goofy we can be,” Tommy told the newspaper. “We always used to joke about it during apartheid days: We’re laughing through our tears.”

The synopsis of the play is given as follows: “Amid the chaos of the Liberian Civil War, the captive wives of a rebel officer band together to form a fragile community – until the balance of their lives is upset by the arrival of a new girl.

Drawing on reserves of wit and compassion, ‘Eclipsed’ reveals distinct women who must discover their own means of survival in this deeply felt portrait of women finding and testing their own strength in a hostile world of horrors not of their own making.”

Tommy, who apparently left South Africa with her family at the age of 15 to move to the United States, has, according to the Times, been tapped to direct “a stage adaptation of a movie she would describe only as involving a budget “that’s bigger than I actually thought you could spend on a thing”.

‘Eclipsed’ begins previews at the Public’s LuEsther Theater on 29 September before an official opening on 14 October, with a limited run through to 29 November 2015.