• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • About
  • Donate

The Arts Fuse

Boston's Online Arts Magazine: Dance, Film, Literature, Music, Theater, and more

  • Podcasts
  • Coming Attractions
  • Reviews
  • Interviews
  • Commentary
  • The Arts
    • Performing Arts
      • Dance
      • Music
      • Theater
    • Other
      • Books
      • Film
      • Food
      • Television
      • Visual Arts
You are here: Home / Theater / Theater Review: “The Convert” — A Zimbabwean Tragedy

Theater Review: “The Convert” — A Zimbabwean Tragedy

February 6, 2016 Leave a Comment

The Convert is a complex historical drama that shows us individuals crushed among powerful contradictions.

The Convert by Danai Gurira. Directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian. Presented by Underground Railway Theater at Central Square Theater. Cambridge, MA, through February 28.

Adobuere Ebiama & Maurice Emmanuel Parent. Photo: A.R. Sinclair Photography.
Adobuere Ebiama and Maurice Emmanuel Parent in the Underground Railway Theater staging of “The Convert” at the Central Square Theater. Photo: A.R. Sinclair Photography.

By Ian Thal

Danai Gurira is a Zimbabwean-American playwright and actress best known to American audiences for her role on TV’s The Walking Dead. As a dramatist, she has taken on the ambitious task of telling the history of Zimbabwe in a cycle of plays. This installment is set between 1895 and 1897 in a drawing room (wonderfully realized by scenic designer Jenna McFarland-Lord) in Salisbury, British South Africa, now Harare, Zimbabwe. The Convert dramatizes individuals crushed among powerful contradictions, victims of the inevitable clash between the traditional cultures of the Shona and Ndebele peoples and the modernizing ways introduced by the British Empire and its Christian missionaries.

The young Shona woman Jekesai (Adobuere Ebiama) is brought by her cousin Tamba (Ricardy Charles Fabre) to the home of Chilford (Maurice Emmanuel Parent), where Tamba’s mother (Liana Asim) is employed as a housekeeper. Jekesai is fleeing her uncle (Paul S. Benford Bruce), Mai Tamba’s younger brother, who wishes to marry her off to a much older man in return for a herd of goats. In the patriarchal culture of the Shona, polygamy is common, so not only is Jekesai running from a forced marriage, but from becoming just the latest of her betrothed’s several wives. Chilford, a western-educated African, a commissioner for native affairs for this district and a devout Roman Catholic, has an eye for the priesthood. When Jekesai states her desire to accept Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior, he vows both to protect her and to provide employment and education. Renamed Ester, she is an earnest believer: Chilford’s will and determination is sufficient proof that Jesus is a powerful deity.

Of course, Gurira is borrowing some narrative elements from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Ester’s Western education — learning to speak, read, and write in English, acquiring knowledge of scripture and liturgy, an acceptance of colonial culture — makes her into her own woman. (Though she is shocked to learn that the racism of white colonials neatly trumps their shared Christian faith.) But Gurira isn’t simply transporting Shaw’s tale to southern Africa; there is a hostile world outside of Chilford’s house. Chilford is a rabid iconoclast, combating pagan ritual in his efforts to advance the Catholic faith (Parent seems to be director Megan Sandberg-Zakian’s go-to guy for portraying religious zealotry). The economic inequalities of colonial rule undermine an agrarian and barter-based social order through the imposition of taxes, wage-labor, and mining. Western paternalism goes a step too far when diseased cattle are slaughtered without compensating poor cowherds: it is no surprise that violence erupts at the end of the second act.

Among the strengths of Gurira’s drama is that the British remain an off-stage presence, present only in the manners and names of the narrative’s English-educated Africans. My first review for The Arts Fuse was of J.T. Rogers’ The Overwhelming, which placed an insufferably stupid, mostly white, American family in the middle of the Rwandan Genocide, perhaps under the misguided notion that audiences cannot appreciate an African story unless the protagonist speaks with an English or American accent. Let’s hope we have gone beyond (or is that left behind?) this kind of hand-holding. Judging by the intense reception the mostly white audience at the Central Square Theater gave The Convert on the night I attended, there is no need to import an American perspective to make ‘international’ drama accessible.

Maurice Emmanuel Parent, Liana Asim, & Adobuere Ebiama. Photo: A.R. Sinclair Photography.
Maurice Emmanuel Parent, Liana Asim, and Adobuere Ebiama in the URT staging of “The Convert” at the Central Square Theater. Photo: A.R. Sinclair Photography.

The only misstep here lies in Sandberg-Zakian’s program notes — my sole quibble with what is an exceptional collection of dramaturgical materials in both the playbill and on Central Square Theater’s website. Still, it is revealing. Sandberg-Zakian tries to connect The Convert with American identity politics conflicts, dedicating two paragraphs to the fact that Dylann Roof, the terrorist who attacked the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, wore the symbol of the white-supremacist regime of Rhodesia on his jacket (one of many shibboleths used by white-supremacists, since both the swastika and the stars-and-bars are easily recognized). This seems to put his murderous rage on par with the well-organized tyranny of the British Empire in Africa — one that could co-opt even a dedicated altrurist like Chilford. Why must we attempt to see other countries as allegories for ourselves? What is so wrong with presenting a story of another continent simply for the sake of broadening our perspectives? Must everything be about ourselves? Most Americans will miss the nuances when Shona is spoken or foreign concepts are introduced, but there is nothing wrong with that, so long as we possess the humility to understand that we are not catching things the first time around. (Gurira recently founded Almasi, a theater company in Zimbabwe that will most likely stage the play for Zimbabwean audiences.)

Parent gives an accomplished performance of Chilford, catching the figure’s contradictions, his severe asceticism and compassionate magnanimity. Even the performer’s fingers are used to express his spiritual breakdown when violence comes to Salisbury and then reaches into his drawing room. Ebiama’s Jekesai/Ester navigates her ever-shifting identities with energetic panache, excited to carve her place in different worlds. Equiano Mosieri, as the English-educated Chancellor, provides plenty of swagger and machismo as the son of a defeated tribal chieftain who colludes with the British for the sake of hedonism and personal advancement. Perhaps Gurira’s most fascinating creation, though, is Prudence, Chancellor’s fiancé, the proud daughter of Ndebele warriors. Her erudition surpasses that of the men around her, yet she is stymied by the patriarchy and racism of both colonized and colonizer. Nehassaiu DeGannes’ performance admirably dovetails the bearing of a Victorian gentlewoman and noble warrior. She also speaks a precise Queen’s English that would put most BBC hosts to shame.

Andrew Kenneth Moss’ fight choreography (incorporating knobkerries – a weapon not usually seen on Boston stages) is compelling, but the actors’ feints were too obvious on the night I attended. Dialect designer Christine Hamel, working closely with Gurira’s script, has done an excellent job of helping Ebiama dramatize Ester’s growing erudition over three acts.

Gurira’s The Convert, with expert assistance from Sandberg-Zakian and her cast and crew, provides a moving glimpse into a complex, sometimes confusing, and ultimately tragic era in a country that has experienced a long chain of historical disasters.


Ian Thal is a playwright, performer, and theater educator specializing in mime, commedia dell’arte, and puppetry, and has been known to act on Boston area stages from time to time, sometimes with Teatro delle Maschere. He has performed his one-man show, Arlecchino Am Ravenous, in numerous venues in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. One of his as-of-yet unproduced full-length plays was picketed by a Hamas supporter during a staged reading. He is looking for a home for his latest play, The Conversos of Venice, which is a thematic deconstruction of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Formerly the community editor at The Jewish Advocate, he blogs irregularly at the unimaginatively entitled The Journals of Ian Thal, and writes the “Nothing But Trouble” column for The Clyde Fitch Report.

Share
Tweet
Pin
Share

By: Ian Thal Filed Under: Featured, Review, Theater Tagged: Central Square Theater, Danai Gurira, Megan Sandberg-Zakian, The Convert, Underground Railway Theater

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Search

Popular Posts

  • Television Review: “Surviving Death” — Probing Death and the Great Beyond Surviving Death's balance between personal experiences... posted on January 11, 2021
  • Jazz Album Review: “El Arte del Bolero” — Passionate Homage to the Era of the Bolero So Miguel Zenón, who on saxophone has the facility of a... posted on January 5, 2021
  • Arts Feature: Best Movies (With Some Disappointments) of 2020 Our demanding critics choose the best films (along with... posted on December 21, 2020
  • Arts Feature: Best Classical Recordings of 2020 The pandemic may have largely shut down live musical pe... posted on December 22, 2020
  • Film/Music Review: The Best Music Documentaries of 2020 — With Some Disppointments Some of the best music documentaries of 2020 - and some... posted on December 29, 2020

Social

Follow us:

Follow the Conversation

  • beverly schwartz January 17, 2021 at 3:23 pm on Book Review: A.B. Yehoshua’s “The Tunnel” — A Serious Romp about an Aging BrainDid not understand the end of "The Tunnel" By A.B. Yeshoshua
  • Tom Augaitis January 15, 2021 at 10:23 pm on Blues Album Review: John Hurlbut and Jorma Kaukonen’s “The River Flows”What a great recording from two masterful artists. Hoping for a sequel.
  • Anthony January 15, 2021 at 7:08 pm on Classical CD Reviews: A Banquet of Beethoven from Daniel Lozakovich, Midori, and Gidon Kremer & FriendsI went ahead and listened to both but I could not finish listening to Midori's, had to stop. Lozakovich's was...
  • Bill Marx, Editor of The Arts Fuse January 15, 2021 at 11:44 am on Film Review: “Pieces of a Woman” — “They give birth astride of a grave…”The quotation in the review's headline is part of a line in Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot: "They give...
  • erica abeel January 14, 2021 at 3:31 pm on Film Review: “Let Them All Talk” — Angst of Many FlavorsI'm most grateful to be read by such responsive readers as you guys!

Footer

  • About Us
  • Advertising/Underwriting
  • Syndication
  • Media Resources
  • Editors and Contributors

We Are

Boston’s online arts magazine since 2007. Powered by 70+ experts and writers.

Follow Us

Monthly Archives

Categories

"Use the point of your pen, not the feather." -- Jonathan Swift

Copyright © 2021 · The Arts Fuse - All Rights Reserved · Website by Stephanie Franz