Writing
Guernica Interview: Liesl Tommy
I first met Liesl Tommy about 6 years ago, at NYU, where she was directing a staged reading of a new play by Zimbabwean playwright Danai Gurira.
Set in rural Liberia during their second civil war, Eclipsed told the story of women brought to a bombed-out rebel army compound to serve as sex slaves. Among the cast were Pascale Armand as the irrepressible and conspicuously pregnant Bessie, Uzo Aduba (Orange is the New Black) as the maternal Helena, and Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years A Slave) as the newest arrival, “The Girl.”
Few could have predicted that so many of the talented women on stage that night were headed for stardom. Even Gurira, who continues to write sought-after plays, would soon become a leading actress, as Michonne, in AMC’s The Walking Dead.
Tommy’s rise to the top of her field, while certainly quieter, has been no less dramatic. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, during the apartheid, Liesl was raised in a colored township until her family moved to Newton, Massachusetts, when she was fifteen. She acted in many plays at Newton North High School, where she fell in love with theater, and went on to study acting at a conservatory in London before entering a joint MFA program at Brown University and Trinity Repertory Company. Early on, Tommy’s teachers saw her knack for directing—“for creating community,” as she describes it—and pushed her to helm a production each year. Before long, she had made the critical transition from acting to directing full-time.
I next spoke to Tommy several months after the reading, at a dinner party at the home of Eclipsed actress Zainab Jah, who plays the gun-toting Maima. Zainab cooked lamb, Adepero Oduye brought egusi soup, and we ate and talked until midnight, code-switching from pidgin to patois to industry jargon to the Queen’s English without skipping a beat. Hailing from Sierra Leone, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Nigeria, and the Caribbean, we were black women artists working in New York City—we embodied multi-hyphenate identities, united by a shared creative struggle. Tommy has the drive, confidence, and enviable work ethic of a woman who knows that she will have to win recognition by force.
Now a world away from that black box at NYU, Eclipsed recently moved from a sold-out run at the Public Theater to the John Golden Theatre on West 45th, making history as the first all-female production on Broadway. For her part, Tommy now regularly flies around the world directing projects of her choosing. She has guest-directed at The Juilliard School, Trinity Rep/Brown University, The Strasberg Institute, and NYU/Tisch School of the Arts. She is also the program associate at the Sundance Institute Theatre Program.
I spoke to Tommy by phone shortly after the Broadway debut of Eclipsed.
Read the rest on Guernica.com or download the full interview.