McCarter Theatre Center Receives Grant to Support New Work by Danai Gurira

McCarter Theatre Center has announced a grant award of $30,000 from the Laurents-Hatcher Foundation to support the development of two new works by actress and playwright Danai Gurira, which will ultimately form a cycle in connection with her 2012 play The Convert.

The Foundation was established in 2010 by playwright, director and screenwriter Arthur Laurents (1917-2011) and his long-term partner Tom Hatcher. The Foundation's Theatre Development Grant program supports the development or production of new plays or musicals. During his career on Broadway and in Hollywood, Laurents' scripts for plays included West Side Story, Gypsy and The Time of the Cuckoo. Among Laurents' many notable screenplays are Hitchcock's Rope, The Way We Were and The Turning Point. In addition to annual awards to support play development, the Laurents-Hatcher Foundation presents a major annual award "for an un-produced, full-length play of social relevance by an emerging American playwright."

The $30,000 grant from the Laurents- Hatcher Foundation will help to support McCarter Theatre Center's continuing collaboration with playwright Danai Gurira, who has been involved with the theater as an actress and a playwright since 2005. In particular, Gurira worked closely with McCarter artistic staff during the development of The Convert, a play set in 1895-96 Salisbury (modern day Harare, Zimbabwe). After its premiere at McCarter in 2012, The Convert went on to award-winning runs at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles. The play was recognized with six Ovation awards, the 2011 Stavis Award, The Edgerton Foundation New American Plays Award, and the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Writing Award.

Born in the US but raised in Zimbabwe, Gurira's experience working on The Convert inspired her to write a cycle of plays set in Zimbabwe over the last century. Throughout the cycle, Gurira intends to mine the history of Zimbabwe to examine the conflict of tradition and progress, race, gender, and family. She has already completed a draft of the third play (chronologically), which is set in 2008 and concerns the savage presidential race between incumbent Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai. To follow will be the second play (chronologically), which will be set sometime between 1896 and 2008.

Gurira's wide-ranging career as an actress, including the lead role in Andrew Dosunmu's acclaimed 2013 film Mother of George and as "Michonne" on AMC's The Walking Dead, remains deeply entwined with her career as a playwright. In an interview for McCarter's website for The Convert, Gurira explained: "In terms of writing, I just wasn't finding enough stories about contemporary African people-or historical, just anything, the whole gamut. I was raised in southern Africa and I came back to the West for college. I was starting to look for what I would like to perform, what I would like to see put to life onstage, and I was finding many stories about everybody else, but none about my own people. My playwriting became a 'necessity being the mother of invention' type thing. I wasn't finding what I wanted to perform, so I started to create it myself." (http://www.mccarter.org/theconvert/)

McCarter's on-going involvement with Gurira has grown into a true cross-cultural collaboration over the past year in conjunction with Almasi, a theater arts organization based in Zimbabwe which is co-founded by Danai Gurira and Zimbabwean director/theatre artist Patience Tawengwa. In August of 2013, Tawengwa travelled to Princeton and spent a month shadowing McCarter's Artistic Director, Emily Mann. More recently (Nov-Dec. 2013), McCarter's Associate Artistic Director Adam Immerwahr has been in Zimbabwe directing a production of The Convert.

The Laurents-Hatcher grant award will provide critical support of Danai Gurira's Zimbabwe plays and ensure this fruitful and productive artistic relationship in the months ahead.

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