The Convert

(Paperback)

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Description

It's 1896 in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Jekesai, a young Shona girl, escapes a forced arranged marriage by converting to Christianity and becoming a protg to an African Evangelical. As anti-colonial sentiments spread throughout the native population, Jekesai is forced to choose between her family's traditions and her newfound faith. This Student Edition of Danai Gurira's 2012 play The Convert includes a commentary by Aviva Neff.

Reviews

A work considering questions of racial, political and religious identity and assimilation with a provocative intelligence -- Mark Lawson * Guardian *
Ms. Gurira ... chronicles the human cost of this turbulent history with impressive clarity and thoroughness ... Of course, [she] has the perspective of a hundred and more years of history to draw on in dramatizing the moral and ethical issues involved in the missionary impulse, and its alliance with the forces of colonization. It is to her credit that she rarely allows The Convert to devolve into an admonishing tract. There is sympathy in her depiction of all the plays characters, who cannot see how powerless they are to control their own fates. Believers in the old ways or adherents of the new, they are united in being caught in the grip of forces larger than themselves. -- Charles Isherwood * New York Times *

Author Bio

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.