Friendly note: This piece contains spoilers about the show, but you should read it anyway!
Adrienne Kennedy called Wole Soyinka, “a giant.” According to reports, the legendary Kennedy, now age 93, told Jeffrey Horowitz — Artistic Director of Theatre for a New Audience — about her deep appreciation for The Swamp Dwellers, an early work by the Nigerian scribe. As a result of that conversation, this nimble, thought-provoking West African drama is finally having its Off-Broadway premiere some 67 years after Soyinka wrote it.
I attended the premiere new to both the play and playwright, but nevertheless excited by this preexisting lore of how the show came to be. I believe that theater is a social event, not just a performance. The night I attended the show had what seemed like a record percentage of Black people in attendance: maybe 20% up from the usual 10% ceiling I’m used to when I attend off-Broadway shows. Once the lights went up and the play began, I was transported quite effortlessly to Soyinka’s “village in the swamps” — a chunk of vicious land in pre-Independence Nigeria — through a beautiful synergy of lush soundscape (design by Rena Anakwe), suggestive set design (by Jason Ardizzone-West), and embodied performance. Then, after the first few words of dialogue were tossed upon the Polonsky Shakespeare Center stage, I realized I was witnessing yet another act of translation — characters from colonial-era Nigeria speaking English in a Brooklyn theater, performed by actors of the West African diaspora, in a country that had once been a British colony itself. It is this refractory quality of experiencing something so specific, yet so markedly out of its time that guided my watching, undergirding the event of the production itself. Questions of time and place — of the playwright's original intention and my current experience, collided upon themselves.
In The Swamp Dwellers, we meet a cross-section of the ethnic and religious groups inhabiting Nigeria, one of the most populous countries in the world. Director Awoye Timpo’s production has a somewhat spectral, dream-like quality befitting such an assemblage. There is a certain lived-in familiarity among the cast’s performance of their characters that bristles up against the fact that nothing about this day in the play’s life is normal.
Husband Makuri (Leon Addison Brown) and wife Alu (Jenny Jules) bicker as married couples do while the hard rain pounding their humble dwelling slowly dies down. (Their community has just been left reeling after a particularly damaging season of flooding). The couple is visited by a series of guests: a blind Muslim beggar from the north (Joshua Echebiri), the local Kadiye, or high holy man, (Chiké Okonkwo) and his entourage of underlings (Olawale Oyenola and Jason Maina). The couple is also reckoning with the return of one of their twin sons, Igwezu (Ato Blankson-Wood) and the mysterious disappearance of his brother, Awuchike, who Alu fears dead. The central question facing all these characters, it seems, is: “In the midst of such turmoil, how will we make it to tomorrow?”
We get the sense that the world outside of Makuri and Alu’s section of swamp — be it their surrounding rural environment or the far-off “big city” — is enormous and often dangerous. Yet somehow, its immensity can all play out within the confines of one small hut. It’s one of the great achievements of good theater: to bring the world down to scale, and Timpo’s production accomplishes it in spades.
Playwrights are curators of historical events. What is the story Soyinka chose to weave from the tapestry of social conditions and human factors in his home country? What forces of conflict and contradiction has he bent to this short, 70-minute evening of live theater to help us see? The Swamp Dwellers is an expertly structured text (one can easily see why Ms. Kennedy teaches it), but we might still ask: what do we gain by engaging with it today, in 2025 New York City? There are many faiths in this swamp: Yoruba and Muslim, most obviously. But in my view, there is another less obvious religion: commerce, modernity’s universal faith. Indeed, there are many social relations in the play: that of the semi-feudal, slavery, and comprador-capitalist. Characters are surrounded by multiple forms of bondage, all overlapping, but joined by a degree of shared exploitation and subservience. Even the holiest man in this town, the Kadiye, seems to answer to both the “Serpent of the Swamp” and good old material offerings. While stark costumes of distinct colors and fabrics by designer Qween Jean help us draw these characters and their unique sociological and geographical origins apart from ours, I wish there was more across writing, direction, and even performance to draw them apart from each other.
One reason that The Swamp Dwellers can be so full, and yet so short, is because it is not so much about new pathways opening up before us, as it is past decisions coming to a head. What we see play out in this one family, in this one household, is implied as something many families across the country must be considering: how to survive, make their way, and not be swallowed up by the natural or manmade dangers around them?
Those questions hang in the air as Igwezu returns, and they begin to take shape through the people he encounters back in his family hut. That first visitor, Echebiri’s wonderfully drawn blind Beggar, actually sees quite well. And he is smart enough to question what is taken as simple fact in Makuri and Alu’s home. His character invites us to ask whether it is truly the supernatural forces that constrain us, or the decisions of man himself. Blankson-Wood, to his credit, gives a controlled, ruminating performance of a man at a crossroads, one who has ventured out searching for his hopeful bounty in the big city only to return to the swamp still dissatisfied. His Igwezu is full of potential energy, looking desperately for where it can be released. Home, as a refuge, turns out to be intractable given the demands of the larger society: the swampland, the city, his missing brother, the Kadiye — all of whom take and demand. In a world of winners and losers, who can be blamed for Igwezu’s misfortune? Who can he seek revenge on? Who can he call on for justice? Does Igwezu know? Do we?"
Representation in art is a tricky thing. There is no one truth to represent. Only the truth as the artist sees it, through the lens of their own ideology. In a world structured by exploitative social systems, without a certain degree of criticism, the most natural reflection can only show us how, but not why a thing occurs. There is much we don’t know in the play due to incomplete plot points. Again, we get the sense that the “fat Kadiye” is corrupt, but we don’t know to what extent. We also don’t get nearly as much context about the ways of colonization in the big city, nor their relationship to the interpersonal drama involving Awuchike, Igwezu and Igwezu’s wife — the latter of which is a huge reveal in the play. For me, this aspect of the offstage world looms large, yet a little too ambiguous.
In the end, we also do not know where Igwezu will go. He claims he cannot stay at home, where his flooded-out farms “betrayed” him; nor can he return to the city — they are both interchangeable “sloughs.” The beggar character feels Igwezu will return one day, like a migrating bird. My friends who also saw the show were convinced enough by the soberness of Blankson-Wood’s exit that they believed Igwezu was going to kill himself in the raging floods. While I see a character resentful of his home — of the people he comes from and their backward way of life befitting only of “the children and the old” — I am not so sure about these fatalistic predictions. Just because one chooses to brave the dangerous conditions of the watery night without even a ferryman to cross, doesn’t mean they can’t make their way. It only means they’ll have to figure it out with great courage. Caught between a rock and a hard place, sometimes the scariest choice is still the right one.
Perhaps that is just me. After all, the artist only sees truth through the veneer of their own ideology. I refuse to give in to ambiguity, to nihilism, to self-destruction. Yes, oppression and exploitation lay everywhere, ruining everything. This truth connects not only the African diaspora, but all victims of capitalism and imperialism across the world. We have all been lied to, abused, taken advantage of. At times, we will be betrayed by our own flesh and blood. Even the promise of love can be threatened by the desperation of toiling subjects. Home remains fraught. Nature itself will imperil our lives. There is no easy answer, only forging ahead in the darkness. Yet we have a responsibility to emerge from the darkness with clarity and determination to know our oppressor, and vanquish him. So when the lights came up, and I found myself back in Brooklyn, I resolved to get to work. The event of the play continues to unfold, and we must make our way to a better tomorrow, come hell or high water.
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The Swamp Dwellers is currently running at Theatre For A New Audience through April 20.
