WALKING DEAD BLONDE ACTRESS FULL
She recalls her time in Zimbabwe fondly-days full of swimming, tennis, and listening to Michael Jackson. It’s a subject matter that is personal for Gurira, who returned to her parents’ native country after Zimbabwe’s war for independence ended. Her other play, Familiar, touches on a lighter subject matter: a family wedding among Zimbabwean-American immigrants and their first-generation children. What about these women who are on the ground, who dismantled his reign? What about Etweda Cooper? What about Etty Weah? What about Rita Wheazor? What about those women? What about Leymah Gbowee, who actually has a Nobel Peace Prize for her work alongside those women? What about those names? We don’t listen to those names,” she says. Yet Gurira says she felt they never got the recognition they deserved, especially in the West, where African conflict is often considered in terms of “statistics or the names of a few war lords.” Libera’s women played a large part in ending the country’s bloody conflict-their efforts are chronicled in the critically acclaimed documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell. In fact, they never meet any of the play’s men-they are invisible forces mentioned in conversation or gestured to offstage. The audience never meets Nyong’o’s captor (or, as the women call him, “C.O.” or “commanding officer”). The Oscar winner plays “the Girl,” a young, intelligent child whose innocence is robbed when, after fleeing an attack on her village, she becomes the unwilling fourth wife of a Liberian war lord. By any mark, Gurira is part of a minuscule club.
According to a report in American Theatre from 2015, only a quarter of American plays in the last 50 years were written by women, and only 12 percent of American plays in the past three years were written by people of color (of either gender). It’s a rare feat for any writer to have two shows playing concurrently, and even rarer for that writer to be an African-American woman. And two of her plays, Familiar and Eclipsed, have lit up their marquees in New York City this year, with Familiar now running at Playwrights Horizons and Eclipsed opening this week on Broadway. The 38-year-old actress is also a playwright-an Obie Award–winning one at that. This month she’s stepping away from the undead and onto Broadway-but despite her famous screen presence, she won’t be taking center stage. Danai Gurira may be best known as *The Walking Dead’*s Michonne, the sword-wielding, zombie-slaying survivor who recently sparked a romance with the show’s protagonist, Rick Grimes.
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