The play, set in 2003 near the end of the civil war in Liberia, is about the survival and resilience of a group of women who are captives of rebels fighting the government. Nyong’o, who made her Academy Award-winning screen debut in “12 Years a Slave,” stars in the role of the “Girl,” the youngest of four captive wives of a rebel commander.

In addition to Nyong’o, the cast also features several Broadway performers, including Saycon Sengbloh (Hair, The Color Purple and Wicked), as well as Pascale Armand (The Trip to Bountiful), Akosua Busia (Mule Bone), and Zainab Jah (In Darfur).

Zimbabwean-American Gurira also stars as the sword-wielding, zombie killer “Michonne” on AMC’s hit series “The Walking Dead”. She’s also appeared in the films “The Visitor” and “Mother of George.” Her stage credits include the role of “ Isabella” in Measure for Measure for which she received the Actor’s Equity Callaway Award. As a playwright, she received an Obie Award, Outer Critics Award, and Helen Hayes Award for In the Continuum. For Eclipsed, Gurira won an NAACP Image Award; the Helen Hayes Award for Best New Play, and the Connecticut Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Production of a Play. Her latest play Familiar will premier in New York at Playwrights Horizons in February 2016.

Eclipsed is directed by Liesl Tommy, who staged the play’s premiere at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington in 2009.

Although the production was originally slated to close Nov. 8, it will now have nine-week run, with a final performance on Nov.29. For tickets and more information, visit here.

#FlashbackFriday to #TheOtherNight The cast of Eclipsed #OpeningNight @publictheaterny

A photo posted by BroadwayBlack (@broadwayblack) on Oct 16, 2015 at 9:03am PDT

#FlashbackFriday via @vintagepopsoul Heading to opening night party! #EclipsedPlay #SayconSengbloh #openingnight #kortomomolu #liberiandesigner @kortomomolu A video posted by BroadwayBlack (@broadwayblack) on Oct 16, 2015 at 9:08am PDT

By @lupitanyongo: So happy to have the Opening of #EclipsedPlay happen @publictheaterny. The intimacy with the audience in the LuEsther theater is precious for us as actors. Thank you for all the support!

A photo posted by BroadwayBlack (@broadwayblack) on Oct 16, 2015 at 9:16am PDT

#FlashbackFriday the beautiful ladies of #EclipsedPlay cast @publictheaterny #openingnight A photo posted by BroadwayBlack (@broadwayblack) on Oct 16, 2015 at 9:42am PDT

#FlashbackFriday #TheWizLive, @bwaycolorpurple cast members support #EclipsedPlay @publictheaterny

A photo posted by BroadwayBlack (@broadwayblack) on Oct 16, 2015 at 9:37am PDT

The post Eclipsed Opens Off-Broadway Starring Lupita Nyong’o appeared first on Broadway Black.

In 1958, he moved from his Philadelphia, P.A. hometown to California where he studied at Los Angeles City College and San Francisco State College. While there, he encountered his first career critics. One professor told him that he would never make it as a writer and another all but ousted him from the Contemporary Literature Club because of the color of his skin. Nevertheless, he was determined to become a writer.

San Francisco became the birthing place for Bullins the playwright. In 1965 Robert Hartman of the San Francisco Drama Circle produced Bullins’ one-act plays How Do You Do?, Dialect Determinism and Clara’s Ole Man at the Firehouse Repertory Theater.

Black Arts/West was also founded in 1965 by revolutionary and poet Marvin X along with Ed Bullins, Ethna Wyatt, Duncan Barber, Hillary Broadous, and Carl Brossiere. Black Arts/West was a conglomerate of black artists in the Black Arts Movement of the 1950s on the west coast. Members of Black Arts/West convinced Eldridge Cleaver to convert a large Victorian house into what Samuel Hays, author of Ed Bullins: A Literary Biography, refers to as the “birthing place of revolutionary thought and activities in Northern California.”

Marvin X facilitated the connection between Cleaver and Black Panther Party Leaders and, together, the group opened Black House at 1711 Broderick Street. Black House served dual functions, as an outlet for Black revolutionary artists and the headquarters of the party. Bullins became the party’s Minister of Culture but by late 1966 ideological differences between party leader Huey Newton and members of Black Arts/West polarized Black House. Bullins left the party and joined Robert Macbeth at the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem in 1967.

While Bullins was delving into the world of African American theater on the west coast, Macbeth— a product of Charleston, S.C., embarked a parallel journey on the east. He was inspired by the beat of the South. The sit-in movement, bus integration rides and protests awakened Macbeth the artist. As an actor, he understudied the likes of James Earl Jones, Louis Gossett and Billy Dee Williams but the heart breaking images of four little black girls, murdered in a fiery Birmingham church on a Sunday morning motivated him to want to do more. Macbeth set out for meaningful contribution in the 1960s and as he began developing his own theater, a colleague sent him Goin’ a Buffalo written by Bullins. He instantly knew that Bullins was the writer he was in search of.  

“I need something Ray Charles-Mahalia Jackson-Miles Davis-Aretha Franklin-Nina Simone-Curtis Mayfield-Jimi Hendrix-John Coltrane, arranged by Duke Ellington or Sun Ra. I was searching for a creative inspiration. I might not be able to describe it clearly, but I knew I would feel it when I read it,” Macbeth recalled in his commentary Bullins and Me a Remembrance of Past Times.

Macbeth contacted Bullins who then sent him In The Wine Time— the first of his Twentieth Century Cycle. Soon Bullins was contracted and settling into the New York scene with Macbeth and the New Lafayette Theater. Bullins served as playwright-in-residence until 1972 and in 1968 he received the Drama Desk-Vernon Rice Award for The Electronic Nigger. During this time he founded and edited Black Theatre Magazine and later formed the Surviving Theatre in the Bronx.

To understand the importance of Bullins in the Black Arts Movement you have to acknowledge the severity of the times. Macbeth explains working with actors and planning for the New Lafayette Theater on the same day, merely 20 blocks away, when Malcolm X was murdered. In 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and the Vietnam War claimed hundreds of young American lives each week. Artists of the movement took on the responsibility of transcribing the Black narrative, investigating and reflecting on aspects of the revolution and informing the masses. While Marvin Gaye wrote What’s Going On, Bullins produced We Righteous Bombers under the name Kinsgley B. Bass, Jr.

His recognition grew in the 1970s. The Fabulous Miss Marie (1971) and In New England Winter (1971) received Obie Awards and The Taking of Miss Janie (1975) won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Bullins assisted young writers as writing coordinator for the New York Shakespeare Festival from 1975 to 1982 and served as playwright-in-residence at the American Place Theatre.

In addition to the Obie and New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, he also received three Rockefeller Foundation playwriting grants, a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, a Visionary Leadership Award from the Theatre Communications Group and an honorary doctor of letters from Columbia College. He taught at several colleges and universities including Northeastern University in Boston, M.A.

Bullins has written over 50 plays. His commitment to exploring the complexities of what it is like to be Black and engulfed by racism, family, music, religion, drugs, violence and everything else in America earned him recognition as one of the best American dramatists of all time.

The post Ed Bullins: A Pioneer of the Black Arts Movement appeared first on Broadway Black.