You could say that Adrienne Kennedy — an ardent fan of Wole Soyinka, whom she called “the greatest living playwright” — was the catalyst for Theater for a New Audience’s landmark production of Soyinka’s The Swamp Dwellers. Kennedy loved Soyinka’s tight, tragic drama and has taught it to generations of her students. Over a decade ago, she introduced the play to Artistic Director Jeffrey Horowitz, imploring him to bring it to life on stage. A public reading soon followed, but it wasn’t until 2018 when Horowitz suggested director Awoye Timpo read the play that the true seed for its New York debut began to take root.
Timpo, with the support of CLASSIX — the Black theater history collective she co-founded with four other theater artists, including this production’s dramaturg, Arminda Thomas — brings The Swamp Dwellers to Brooklyn, 67 years after a 24-year-old Soyinka wrote it. Timpo architects the 2025 production with a reverence for its location — a village in the swamps of the Nigerian Delta — if not a complete fidelity to 1958, the year in which the play was written and is set. Watching the play within the ultramodern confines of the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, I wished that the evocative but minimal set and lighting design (by Jason Ardizzone-West and Seth Reiser, respectively), had done more to immerse me in the hot, sticky swaps of a bygone Nigeria. However, in my conversation with Timpo, it became clear that evoking the past was not her intention.
“I was never thinking of making a period piece. I wanted to be authentic to the period and be accurate and appropriate, but also let it live right now,” the director stated. “It's not useful or interesting, I think, to feel like we have to plant ourselves in the [past] and not be where we are. We're coming to it from 2025, you know? So I think what we've found, I hope, is a thing that lives in a time, but it also connects to our time. We're in a very liminal, present, contemporary space, while we're living inside of a space of the past that is connected to the present. That's the thing that's really exciting about digging into this play, is letting it live now and not being afraid of that.”
In a promotional video served to me on Instagram, Timpo goes on to say that though the play was written decades ago, it “feels like it was written today.” While its thematic richness encourages a sort of timeless interpretation, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Soyinka’s poetic parable feels contemporary, though there are points of verisimilitude in familial dynamics and characterization for modern audiences to relate to.
The plot concerns an older married couple, Makuri (Leon Addison Brown) and Alu (Jenny Jules), a barber/basket weaver and textile artist, respectively, who are parents to adult twin sons, Awuchike and Igwezu (a fiery Ato Blankson-Wood). Awuchike left his home in the swamps years ago to make a living in the city, and the family hasn’t heard from him for long enough that Alu presumes him dead. Igwezu ventured to the city mere months ago to be with his new wife and try his luck in business, but he is felled by cruelty and betrayals that leave him bankrupt, save for a small plot of land back home. On the day the play is set, his parents eagerly await his return — and with it news of their other son — but before Igwezu arrives, they receive two visitors to their modest home: a blind beggar (the moving Joshua Echebiri) from the North who believes he can once again make fruitful the deluged land around the swamp, and the Kadiye (Chiké Okonkwo), a holy man who accepts precious offerings from the village people to protect their crops from the swamp serpent. When Igwezu finally arrives, he sees that the raging floods have destroyed his plot and quickly turns on the Kadiye, who he believes has been feasting on the community’s gifts instead of presenting them to the serpent in exchange for more merciful weather.
When I ask Timpo how she feels this work lives in 2025, she first turns the question back on me. I tell her that the play feels like a prescient call to take stock of the corrupt systems at work around us, because unless we make an active decision to intervene, they’re only going to amplify. I tell her that the play feels like a reminder to seek out comrades who want to build towards a just vision of the world, as the Beggar does with Igwezu, because money and convenience can debase those you thought were closest to you, even blood. I tell her that the play feels like a warning. It forecasts the sense of opportunity that would arise with Nigeria’s independence in 1960, but also the rampant exploitation that colonial powers would facilitate even after they were no longer, officially, in control, and which still plagues the entire African continent to this day.
I was privileged to hear Soyinka, now 90 years old, give a talkback on “Africa Night” at The Swamp Dwellers, and speak of that era of independence — full of promise and despair — from his own lived experience:
“I was still a student. We were on the threshold of independence. Nationalism was fierce, Pan-Africanism was fierce, and we tried to display a kind of pan-Nigerianism, which then would become the pattern. All these elements were constantly with us, and we were going to go physically, militarily to liberate settler colonialism in southern Africa, particularly in South Africa. We mobilized in various ways. We didn't speak of ethnicity. We used it as a cultural basis. And so, hopes were very high. But disillusionment began very fast after independence, very, very fast. And it happens to all societies. In time, years to come, even this country will be speaking of pre-Trump and post-Trump America. No different from what happened to us, let's say, in terms of expectations and realities. A sense of betrayal by the first-line nationalists who we saw as the leaders of the revolution. A transformation of the entire continent. And then, to use my own expression, we realized that their first concern was to step into the shoes of the departing colonial masters. Not so much to transform, not to create a new entity, which is what we sensed we were born to do, but simply a change of occupants of the boots of oppression. That's why I say that [the play] marks the period of innocence in many ways.”
Even during this pre-independence period of relative innocence, Soyinka’s writing was incredibly perceptive about the personal, social, religious, and tribal dynamics that hindered the flourishing of post-colonial Nigeria. The end of the play — when Makuri temporarily banishes Igwezu from the family home to protect him from the Kadiye’s threats, yet Igwezu declines the Beggar’s offer to accompany him on the treacherous journey back to the city — is tellingly ambiguous. Igwezu has taken the first crucial step in standing up to the Kadiye’s corruption, but in the darkness of the night and the murk of the swamp, with no real prospects in the city but no comforts at home, my feeling was that his future is uncertain at best. Timpo, however, says that Soyinka told the company that the play is fundamentally hopeful, and he himself said that upon revisiting it after decades he found it to be shockingly optimistic.
“I think, secretly, I was afraid of re-encountering the play. I didn't want to,” Soyinka told our audience. “As I confessed to the cast when I met them for the first time, I told them I refused to read the play until I had the opportunity of sitting with them, with the company, to sense what they experienced or how they approached it, and relate that to how I felt when I wrote it. So a number of things were quite new to me when I listened to the reading. I deliberately refrained, and then I hadn't read the play for over 40 years. And I thought I deserved that, at least, of seeing a new play. In other words, without working at it. And the sensation which I had, frankly, was, was I really that optimistic? That was the main thing that came out of me. Was I, really? And I was… And so looking back, it wasn’t bad to have been optimistic. At least one had that to remember, when everything looked possible.”
While Soyinka was clearly writing out of a sense of liberatory possibility, Timpo’s response to the question of the play’s present relevance is no less deeply felt but certainly more equivocal.
“I'm intrigued by how everybody responds to change,” she says. “And there's all different kinds of change, right? And we all respond to different kinds of change in different ways. But I think it's made me reflect on how nimble I am in the face of change. How much I might reject change or how much I push towards change as well, and all the different ways that we navigate all the things that are thrown at us. The thing I really respect and love about the character of Igwezu is that there's so much crazy happening all around him, but he does make a choice to say, ‘Hold on a second, wait, we don't need to go on like this,’ even though it has very severe consequences.”
The full weight of Igwezu’s consequences are left for the viewer to infer. When I saw the play for the second time four days later, I brought my cousin, an undergraduate senior at Columbia University who had been in a production of Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel in Nigeria in her youth. When I asked what she thought happened to Igwezu, she said it was “giving suicide.” Indeed, in some versions of the Yoruba myth from which The Swamp Dwellers draws loose inspiration, the Igwezu proxy wanders into the dark forest and hangs himself. That, too, is a form of change, isn’t it?
Igwezu’s fate haunts me, perhaps even more so in this present political moment when my cousin’s classmates are being rounded up and deported or imprisoned for protesting Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. Witnessing them, like Igwezu, be hunted and exiled for challenging injustice, I find myself very far from the optimism from which Soyinka birthed this play. But then again, he was writing at the dawn of a new nation, and I am watching from inside the collapse of an old one.
I ask Timpo if Soyinka gave the company any sage wisdom or special insight when he came to visit them in rehearsal, something new to turn over in my troubled mind. Excitedly, she tells me he did.
“We asked him, ‘If you were writing this play today, what would you change?’ And he said, ‘I would have Igwezu slit the Kadiye’s throat.’”
They were stunned. But then she continued, “He kind of took it back and he said, ‘But I'm glad that I didn't do that, because where would it end?’”
Given our current circumstances, I can’t help but wonder. As an example of drama, the play is elegantly constructed, beautifully written, and ends on a banger of a line which I won’t spoil, even if the production itself, though finely acted and astutely observed in direction and design, wasn’t completely transportive. But if a play is, to quote Soyinka, an attempt to “try and put a slice of reality on the world in a way in which it is congruent with mundane experience or exceptional experience,” now more than ever I long for a slice of reality in which the throat of villainy is slit, its blood spread to make fertile the soil of a new beginning.
As Timpo shared more of what Soyinka said that day, I realized that perhaps The Swamp Dwellers’ most prescient omen for 2025 wasn’t in the words of the play, but in its rhythms. The Kadiye is accompanied wherever he goes by a Servant (Jason Maina) and a Drummer (Olawale Oyenola), whose beating on his talking drum signals the Kadiye’s approach and punctuates conversations. Timpo tells me that certain drum patterns actually represent proverbs that Soyinka gave to her and Thomas, which they, along with music supervisor Chief Ayanda and Oyenola, inserted at strategic moments in the play. One such proverb, played as Igwezu starts to challenge the Kadiye: “The direction we're heading in can only lead to one outcome.”
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The Swamp Dwellers is currently running at Theatre For A New Audience through April 20.
