Out of Africa — Three disparate productions highlight haunting aspects of the continent

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

South Africa was the subject of much powerhouse theater throughout the apartheid era, and Wole Soyinka wrote about Nigeria decades ago. But until recently, plays about other parts of Africa have been few and far between, despite the fact that the continent has been the focus of countless headlines, with datelines ranging from Kenya, Zimbabwe, Liberia and Sierra Leone to, most recently, Sudan and the Ivory Coast.

Lynn Nottage’s “Ruined,” the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner that began life at the Goodman Theatre, and captured the terrible fate of women in the recent civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, certainly upped the ante. So did the Broadway musical, “Fela!,” with its celebration of Fela Kuti, the legendary Nigerian musician who popularized Afrobeat rhythms. And among other notable works seen here have been: J.T. Rogers’ “The Overwhelming,” set on the eve of the Rwandan genocide (a knockout at Next Theatre in 2009); J. Nicole Brooks’ vivid “Black Diamond,” about the Liberian civil war (at Lookingglass Theatre in 2007); and Bruce Norris’ “The Unmentionables,” about would-be American do-gooders in an unnamed West African nation (at Steppenwolf Theatre in 2006).

Now, in the coming week alone, three plays that deal either directly or indirectly with Africa are headed for major Chicago stages.

At Northlight Theatre you will find Hallie Gordon directing Danai Gurira’s “Eclipsed,” another play about the Liberian civil war and the terrible toll it exacted on women. (Gurira previously penned the award-winning “In the Continuum,” a look at an American woman and African woman, both victims of HIV, presented at the Goodman in 2007.)

At TimeLine Theatre, Nick Bowling is directing the Chicago premiere of “In Darfur,” a work by playwright and journalist Winter Miller that was inspired by her trips to that area of Sudan. Miller traveled alongside Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist whose crusading stories highlighted the horrors of the civil war that has raged there since 2003.

Finally, at Next Theatre, there is Rogers’ “Madagascar” (a play that predated “The Overwhelming” and is driven by indirect references to Africa), directed by Kimberly Senior. Despite its title, which refers to the island nation in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of Africa — a place very different from the rest of the continent — it is set in Rome. But according to Rogers, events that occurred in Madagascar “haunt the play’s [white] characters, and mean different things to each of them — evoking shame in one, and childhood peace, as well as loss in another.”

Although Rogers is widely traveled and “fascinated by the outside world” (the son of a political science professor, he lived in Malaysia and Indonesia as a child), he only made his first visit to Africa (a trip to Rwanda) in 2006.

“I do a great deal of research, but creativity is also wildly underrated,” quipped Rogers about his relative lack of first-hand experience of Africa. “I’m always proud when people who have been to a place I’ve written about say I got it exactly right.”

In Gurira’s “Eclipsed,” actress Alana Arenas plays Helena, a twentysomething woman who was captured as a young teenager. She now serves as the mother figure among a group of female prisoners of war forced to be “wives” to a Liberian warlord.

“My experience in the cast of ‘Black Diamond,’ which dealt with the same conflict, has helped me greatly,” said Arenas. “So have my travels in Africa.”

“I was part of a study abroad program, and visited Ghana about 10 years ago, and more recently I traveled to Morocco,” said Arenas, a Steppenwolf ensemble member.

“In Ghana, I began to realize how everything is about the community, while American culture is so individualistic.

“More recently, I watched a documentary about Senegal that left me thinking about how powerful the whole idea of custom can be in Africa, and how sad it is when poverty and war forces people to abandon their customs and who they really want to be.”

“But the women in this play grapple to hold on to certain things, despite their situation,” Arenas noted.

“And in real life, it was women whose ground-up protests even helped bring the war to an end. In fact, now Liberia [a nation established in the 19th century by freed American slaves] is even the first African country to elect a female president.”

In the TimeLine production of “In Darfur,” set in 2004, actress Mildred Marie Langford plays Hawa, a Darfuri Muslim woman of about 30 whose husband and son were systematically slaughtered in the civil war, and whose village was burned.

“Hawa, a fictional version of a real Darfuri woman, is from the northern capital of Khartoum, and she has found asylum at a refugee camp,” explained Langford. “Her father was a village chief who believed in education for his daughters, which was unusual, and she studied literature.”

Now, at the camp, Hawa is trying to regain some normalcy by teaching kids and trying to change their thought processes so they won’t turn to violence. A visiting journalist becomes interested in her story, but when her name is used in a column it creates even further danger for her. Complicating matters, too, is the fact that she is pregnant and not sure whether the father was her husband or the soldier who raped her.

“I’ve read so much about the atrocities against women there, and how they have managed to retain some sort of dignity and pride,” said Langford. “They have ‘the African heart’ — a deep love of their country that makes them hold onto the idea of returning home, and picking up the pieces of their lives.”

Though Langford has never visited Africa, she feels a deep affinity for the place.

“I grew up in Virginia, in an extremely diverse neighborhood that had many African, Indian and Latin people,” she said. “And my best friend, starting in seventh grade, was from Sierra Leone, and I’d go to parties and meet her family. I’ve also been in quite a few African-themed plays, including ‘Sarafina’ and ‘The Overwhelming’. But I still don’t understand why all the killing goes on. There is so much intermarriage. And they are all Africans.”