The Convert

Danai Gurira is an award-winning Zimbabwean American actor and playwright. As a playwright, her works include In The Continuum (OBIE Award, Outer Critics Award, Helen Hayes Award), Eclipsed (NAACP Award; Helen Hayes Award, Best New Play), The Convert (six Ovation Awards, Los Angeles Outer Critics Award), and Familiar, which has its world premiere at Yale Rep in February 2015. She is the recipient of the Whiting Award, a former Hodder Fellow and has been commissioned by Yale Rep, Center Theatre Group, Playwrights Horizons and the Royal Court. She is the co-founder of Almasi Collaborative Arts, which works to give access and opportunity to the African Dramatic Artist. Aviva Neff is an artist-scholar-educator with extensive experience in youth and community engaged art. A graduate of the College of Wooster, Aviva received her MA in Applied Theatre with distinction from Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK, and her PhD from Ohio State University, US. She teaches in Otterbein University's department of Theatre and Dance and serves as an intimacy coordinator in theatre productions at Columbus College of Art and Design.

Chronology

Commentary

Playwright
Overview of her other works; connection to Blank Panther

Cultural/Historical Context & Themes
British Colonialism, enslavement, the collision of indigenous religions & Catholicism, the loss and rediscovery of faith, women's rights & gendered hierarchies, war, race, "civilization"
Relationship to other art & literature on colonisation (such as Nottage's Ruined and Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman)
Religious radicalism: then and now

Characters
Jekesai/"Ester" as a lens for experiencing the rise of Christian colonialism
Mai Tamba's religious duality
Chilford as the "model" convert

Place
Mashona & Matabeleland / Rhodesia

Language
Different forms of language (including Chishona)
Language and culture and its links to politics and identity

Play in performance
Costume, music and movement

Influences
George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion
Black Panther

Productions and adaptations
Overview of production history and critical casting, including its world premiere at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago, and the play's place in Kwame Kwei-Armah's inaugural season at the Young Vic, London

PLAY TEXT

Notes