The Swamp Dwellers

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Before he was a Nobel laureate, before his name was canonized in the firmament of world literature, Wole Soyinka was a young playwright—barely in his mid-twenties—when he penned The Swamp Dwellers in 1958. And yet, this early work bears the unmistakable gravitas of myth: a compact, hour-long domestic drama that pulses with elemental force. In director Awoye Timpo’s hauntingly grounded revival, the piece reverberates with contemporary resonance. It is at once a family portrait and a parable, steeped in the muddy waters of postcolonial Nigeria and rippling outward into modern-day concerns—climate change, disillusionment with institutions, and the aching silence left by absent gods.

Soyinka’s plays are a rare presence on New York stages, and rarer still is a staging of The Swamp Dwellers making its New York premiere, his meditation on family, faith, and the fault lines of change. All the more reason to welcome the handsome and contemplative revival now running at Brooklyn’s Theatre for a New Audience. Written just two years before Nigeria’s independence from British colonial rule, the play captures a nation—and a family—poised uneasily between past and future. In a swampy village in the rural south, tradition clings like humidity, but the siren call of modernization and urban prosperity grows ever louder. Soyinka renders this cultural crossroads not as abstract polemic but as lived tension: parents anchored in ancestral rhythms, children drawn toward an uncertain future. The result is a quietly resonant drama whose questions still echo far beyond its time and place.

The Beckettian echoes are unmistakable: the suspense of a long-awaited return that may never come, the disruption of a stranger who speaks in riddles, the slow revelation that salvation, if it exists at all, comes not from above but from within. Yet Soyinka resists the existential drift of Waiting for Godot. There is a return, and Igwezu’s homecoming—bruised by betrayal, financial ruin, and ecological despair—is one of the production’s most emotionally potent turns. Ato Blankson-Wood peels back his character’s stoicism with agonizing precision, revealing a man stripped not only of livelihood but of faith in anything—family, nature, or divine justice.

Timpo orchestrates the cast with the precision of chamber music. Leon Addison Brown’s Makuri, a quiet-spoken barber and basket-weaver, hums with warmth and quiet resignation, his optimism tempered by a sadness he dares not name, and the powerful Jenny Jules, a tower of maternal strength, gives the character of Alu, Makuri’s devoted wife, a resonance that lingers even after she exits halfway through—a curious absence in a play that otherwise leans on the power of presence. She crafts vibrant traditional Yoruba cloth, remaining tethered to their ancestral land, her colors juxtaposed to that graying earth, drowning beneath seasons of relentless rain. Around them, farms sink into swamp, and the future seeps away with the rising water.

The twin sons have already fled to the city, swept up in the currents of a rapidly modernizing Nigeria—fueled by the early booms of oil and timber, and the lure of wealth in an increasingly global economy. Yet it’s Alu, sharp-eyed and unsentimental, who voices the ache at the heart of Soyinka’s The Swamp Dwellers: the fear that progress may come at the cost of connection. “All the young men go into the big town to try their hand at making money,” she tells her husband, in a line that could echo in real life as it often does in literature. “Only some of them remember their folk and send word once in a while.” Jules delivers it not with bitterness, but with subdued surrender—the voice of a mother who has seen too many sons vanish into the future without looking back.

All is far from well in the city—or with the prodigal son, Awuchike, the first to leave of the twin brothers, who has not only severed all ties with his parents since leaving home but has also betrayed his own blood in ways that cut deep. His absence hangs over the family like a storm cloud, but it’s the younger twin, Igwezu (Blankson-Wood), who returns, hollowed out by the betrayal and ruin. Beneath his quiet, dutiful exterior, a slow-burning rage simmers, and in his confrontation with the Kadiye—the village priest clad in fine robes and false promises—it finally erupts. Chiké Okonkwo’s well-fed Kadiye is all polished charm and ritualistic pageantry, offering blessings and prosperity in exchange for offerings, but to Igwezu, his patter sounds as hollow as the empty baskets left behind by floodwaters. It’s a devastating moment of reckoning—not just between man and god, but between illusion and truth, tradition and survival.

Out of the mist emerges a mysterious beggar, played with quiet magnetism by Joshua Echebiri. His sudden arrival unsettles the rhythms of the household, and his presence bristles with unanswered questions. Why has he journeyed the entire length of the river to reach this remote home? And why does he pointedly refuse the offerings of the Kadiye, the self-styled priest who claims to wield power over the swamp’s serpentine dangers? In Echebiri’s hands, the Beggar is no mere wanderer but a quiet agent of disruption—his resistance to false sanctity and his search for purpose lend the play a mythic undertow, as if he’s been sent not by fate, but to challenge it. Echebiri’s Beggar is a revelation, transforming from vagabond to visionary before our eyes.

Jason Ardizzone-West’s set—a weathered wood cabin adrift in a sea of black water—visualizes the play’s liminal atmosphere: the last human outpost before the world dissolves into swamp. Seth Reiser’s lighting and Rena Anakwe’s sound design conjure a sensory world thick with tension: the hiss of insects, the breath of damp air, the flicker of light through mist. Costume designer Qween Jean opts for a palette of muted, earth-toned garments that quietly reinforce the play’s themes of endurance and erosion. The clothing feels lived-in and weathered, grounded in the natural world and subtly reflective of the characters’ economic realities and emotional states. There’s a quiet poetry to these choices—nothing ostentatious, but everything resonant. Every element works in concert to heighten the sense that this is not just a story of a family at a crossroads, but of a world teetering on the brink.

Director Timpo’s The Swamp Dwellers never lectures, never insists. Instead, it flows, dark and slow, like the river that threatens to overtake the land—and maybe already has. The one misstep in the production comes from dialect coach Jane Guyer Fujita not policing the opening scene between the husband and the wife: the faithfulness to the Nigerian sound was unfortunately at the expense of Soyinka’s text and in particular some very necessary exposition for the audience.

What resonates most in The Swamp Dwellers is the quiet, lyrical clarity of Soyinka’s dialogue—a plainspoken poetry that gives voice to deep philosophical and cultural tensions without ever feeling false in the mouths of rural characters. His language elevates the material not through grandiosity, but through a kind of grounded grace, capturing the ache of a family—and a nation—caught between worlds. More than six decades after its premiere, the play still seethes with relevance for Western audiences. Its themes—family loyalty strained by distance, the disillusionment of urban migration, ecological collapse, and the corrosive power of religious opportunism—feel startlingly current. It is a striking testament to the enduring power of Soyinka’s early vision: that the personal is always political, and that myth still lives, if you know where to listen. Soyinka’s Nigeria of the 1950s may be geographically and temporally distant, but the struggles it portrays are still very much our own.

The Swamp Dwellers (extended through April 27, 2025)

Theatre for a New Audience

The Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage at The Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Ashland Place, in Brooklyn

For tickets, visit http://www.tfana.org

Running time: 75 minutes without an intermission