We are finally in a season of staging and honoring our elder Black playwrights. Recent productions of Alice Childress’s Wine in the Wilderness, Ossie Davis’ Purlie Victorious, Adrienne Kennedy’s Ohio State Murders, and more have found their way onto New York City stages after only receiving sparse attention. These plays gift us deft examples of craft and a singularity that has since become obscured amid this city’s obsession with safe, predictable, often eurocentric theater. And to me, they provide in abundance what a great many mainstream plays have forgotten: uniqueness.
Too often, the season choices made by producers and artistic directors feels trend-based, especially revivals. There’s nothing more frustrating than when the texture of a play — the specific commands of set design, casting, language, and more — are traded in for a generic blankness, or muddled with race-blind casting in the key of “I don’t see color.” One of the best parts of theater is being transported to new worlds alongside a room full of people who are also game. I want to see the shabby, French Quarter apartment in A Streetcar Named Desire. Take me to the ornate residence in A Doll’s House. I crave a world different than my own.
With that in mind, I was excited for my visit to Theater for a New Audience to see Wole Soyinka’s The Swamp Dwellers, a production that felt wholly distinct from shows I had seen previously. I don’t think there are many African playwrights being produced in New York or the US more broadly. There are certainly very few plays about Africa pre-colonization, with many African plays dealing with immigration stories or narratives about being between two worlds (many of which I love). This felt different though, more removed than what I was familiar with. I was shocked to see this play announced, especially when there wasn’t a clear “lesson” attached, but nevertheless, I was grateful (I love when taste wins).
As a Nigerian-American, Soyinka’s work is something I have noted over the years without actually exploring (shame on me). My dad talks about Soyinka frequently and I actually own several of his plays and books, but I haven’t sat down to truly dive in (double shame). This production was my first official experience of his worldbuilding, a practice rife with playfulness, poetry, and mysticism.
I hoped to bring another Nigerian with me, or at least establish some African kinship in the audience, but I came to the theater alone — rushing like always, with only minutes to spare before the pre show music quieted. Thankfully, in an audience of white people, I caught a few Black people dressed in bright golds, reds, and blues — our interest in Soyinka’s work was palpable. I felt a lilt of excitement rising through me, through them. House lights, down. Here we go.
Reader, I was chuffed. I felt the specific kind of joy while watching The Swamp Dwellers that great theater always elicits. It’s the feeling you get when you find a vintage gem in a thrift store full of Shein. Or the assurance you feel when you sidestep Chipotle for a delicious, mom-and-pop eatery. Joy. Elation. Reader, I found beauty. It was so individual, so immersive.
Let’s walk it back though. This joy snuck up on me. At first, I felt uncertain while trying to find my footing in Soyinka’s world. Set in 1950s Nigeria’s delta region, married couple Alu (a stellar Jenny Jules) and Makuri (a confident Leon Addison Brown) live in a modest hut atop a swamp. The set design by Jason Ardizzone-West felt specific, especially coupled with swamp sounds and croaking frogs from sound designer Rena Anakwe. The married couple await the return of their son, Igwezu (Ato Blankson-Wood), from the “big city.” Igwezu has been away for many months, partly in search of his twin brother Awuchicke, who Alu fears is dead.
Awuchicke’s disappearance undergirds the couple’s squabbles — lending the play an initial sense of unease. Alu fears that her son has died “in the marshes.”
“No one knows. Only the Serpent can tell,” says Alu. “Only the Serpent of the swamps, the Snake that lurks beneath the slough.” Meanwhile, Makuri largely dismisses Alu’s anxiety and remains focused on weaving a basket. He is preoccupied with the bumbling of traditions: particularly, the young people like his sons who run from the village and rarely or never return, as well as the endless downpour of damaging rains.
As the play went on, a sense of familiarity sunk in. Under the direction of director Awoye Timpo (a fellow theatermaker of West African descent), The Swamp Dweller’s ensemble nailed the cadence and dramatic flair of Nigerian speak. At times, I wondered about the accuracy of accents, but was never taken out of the play.
Personally, I started to feel a bit lost about the Serpent and other traditions referenced, but not fully explained in the show. One great quality about Soyinka’s work is that he actually doesn’t explain. There isn’t exposition for the audience’s sake. Soyinka takes this couple with their banter, anger, and flirtation, and invites us in. Thankfully, Timpo allowed the play to truly be what it is, meeting the work where it was. There was no attempt to make it into something more dramatic or more obvious. Soyinka’s subtlety and wit, his blending of lore — exist at face value. I, in turn, told myself to be present, to take the story as is instead of looking for metaphor or explanation.
After some time spent in Alu and Makuri’s home, a man appears at the door. It’s not Igwezu, but rather a blind, Muslim beggar, played by a mysterious Joshua Echebiri. The beggar has traveled from the north and is looking for land to tend. Shortly after, the couple receives another visitor: the high holy man, or Kadiye (Chiké Okonkwo), hoping to catch Igwezu for a beard trimming. My curiosity piqued as these characters entered. Again, I felt myself wondering about where Soyinka was taking us.
Amid the flurry of guests, Igwezu finally appears. Blankson-Wood’s searing performance immediately filled me with anxiety. Igwezu entered with such a bitter, angry energy, and then went on to recount the betrayal he faced from his twin, his inability to make wealth in the city, and how the nonstop rain had ruined his harvest. He quickly turns his ire on Kadiye, whose spiritual safeguards have not protected Igwezu’s happiness.
Igwezu peppers Kadiye with questions while tending to his facial hair, sharp shaving knife in hand. I fully gripped my seat, feeling the confrontation coming. To him, Kadiye is a fraud who has failed to ensure him the life he thinks he deserves. After the confrontation, Igwezu wearily leaves the residence for the river. “Only the children and the old stay here, bondsman. Only the innocent and the Dotards,” he laments to the beggar.
Overall, the play was a test in patience and trust for me. I am so used to instant gratification in theater, the belief that a writer should “hook” my “attention” within the first 10 minutes before conjuring a solution by the play’s end. The Swamp Dwellers, though, pivots away from that structure. Instead, it’s like a fable: circumstances and characters come first, with Soyinka saving our peak conflict and more dynamic stage action for last.
This early work by Soyinka — Africa’s first Nobel Laureate in Literature — is a feat of imagination, language, and story. Unexpectedly, The Swamp Dwellers left me feeling more emotional by the end. To me, the play is about family, about inheritance, and how hard it is to make our way in this world. Blankson-Wood’s performance, especially his communication of betrayal, reminded me how fragile traditions are. It’s not that young people “want” to leave the village for the city. It’s that these ways of life, these simpler times, have largely dissolved, leaving us all consumed in anger and pity.
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The Swamp Dwellers is currently running at Theatre For A New Audience through April 20.
