The Convert

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 play’s 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 *

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. She is the recipient of the Whiting Award, a former Hodder Fellow and has been commissioned by Yale Rep, Center Theatre Group, and Playwrights Horizons. 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.