NEW YORK — Danai Gurira is a rising star in the theater, the author of powerful, often harrowing plays. When she’s not doing that, you can find her chopping up zombies.
Gurira, an award-winning writer who explores African lives onstage, also plays the katana-wielding walker assassin Michonne on AMC’s “The Walking Dead.” Is the pen mightier than the sword?
“To me, it’s all storytelling,” said Gurira over tea and honey recently. “What I’m always looking for is a good story. If it’s a great story, I will submit to it.”
Both the battle-hardened TV heroine and the powerful playwright are on full-tilt this fall as “The Walking Dead” begins its sixth season and Gurira’s play “Eclipsed,” starring Lupita Nyong’o, thrills New York. It will transfer to Broadway this February.
“I think Danai is really a phenomenal human being. She’s got such a strong voice and she’s so profoundly creative that she’s able to create these really distinctive stories and characters. I’m just spellbound,” said Nyong’o, who first met that playwright at Yale.
Gurira’s play, first produced in 2009 and making its New York debut this month at The Public Theater, focuses on four women held captive by the brutal leader of a rebel faction during the Liberian civil war. It gives Gurira a chance to explore an unseen world.
“I pick up a lot of scripts where the African women on the page were underexplored and deeply underwritten. For some reason that was acceptable. And it was unacceptable to me,” she said.
“I simply find African women amazing and interesting and complex and fascinating and multidimensional. And I find the world doesn’t seem to see that at all.”
Gurira’s plays have often explored African women in crisis but lately she’s started to look at the fault line of race in America. Her next play is “Familiar,” which will premiere in New York at Playwrights Horizons next February.
“She’s providing the African woman with voices she herself was hungry for,” said Nyong’o. “She’s telling our stories and giving us access to really, really meaty material.”
Gurira sees signs that America — led by a president with an African last name — is starting to embrace Africa and its varied voices. She sees it in celebration after Nyong’o’s Oscar win, in the humor of the new “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah, in the musical “Invisible Thread” and in award-winning authors Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and NoViolet Bulawayo.
“It’s really an exciting time,” she said. “I think the African for too long has been underrepresented, misrepresented, distorted in how they’re represented, spoken for instead of being allowed to speak for themselves.”
As for her sword-carrying Michonne, Gurira said: “I love the places that I’ve been able to go with her. I love how her own expression of self has been tempered, how she has adjusted, how her wants have shifted, how she’s embraced people, how she’s opened up her heart.”
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