Ato Blankson-Wood, Chiké Okonkwo, and Leon Addison Brown in The Swamp Dwellers. Photo: Hollis King

The future literature Nobelist Wole Soyinka was not even twenty-five in 1959 when he wrote The Swamp Dwellers, a taut drama that plays out simultaneously on realist and mythic levels, a domestic drama happening almost in real time that also feels rooted in the deepest questions and conflicts of myth: brother against brother; man against nature; man propitiating the gods. It’s set in a specific place, a village in the Nigerian swamps, at a precise moment in history–immediately after the discovery of oil in the Niger Delta, immediately before independence from the United Kingdom–but still speaks to issues that feel very present in modern America: climate change and environmental destruction; political corruption; loss of faith in our institutions and our gods. It packs a lot of punch into a compact package, barely more than an hour long but weighing heavy on us by the end. Director Awoye Timpo adroitly balances archetype against character, bringing us figures whose life circumstances are grounded but who also have the gravitas of those moved by the Fates.

Makuri (Leon Addison Brown) and his wife, Alu (Jenny Jules), have made their life in this rural village, but both their twin sons have moved away to seek greater wealth and opportunities in the city, as most of the young people of their community do. (As their son later says, “Only the innocents and the dotards” remain.) Today, Makuri and Alu tensely await the return of their son Igwezu (Ato Blankson-Wood), who had arrived from the city earlier that day but rushed immediately back out to check on his small farm after a series of floods. The couple hopes Igwezu will bring news of their other son, his twin brother Awuchike, who has not been in contact with his family. Alu believes Awuchike to be long dead, but hopes she’s wrong; Makuri believes him to be living large in the city, but you can sense a sadness at the thought that his son would cut off contact so thoroughly. When they hear footsteps on the pathway that leads to their front door, though, the new arrival is not Igwezu but a blind beggar (Joshua Echebiri), a wanderer looking to set down new roots (figuratively and literally; coming from the drought-ridden north, he wants to farm a plot of wet land). 

There are echoes of Waiting for Godot here–both in the suspension Makuri and Alu feel regarding Awuchike (Will he come? Is he dead?) and in the bait-and-switch whereby instead of the traveler who they have been promised, a holy fool (a la Godot’s Lucky) arrives. Unlike Lucky, though, the beggar has chosen to change his fate, to set his life on a new course. And unlike Godot, Igwezu will come in time, creeping in like a ghost, his spirit broken by both the destruction of his crop and the events that led him to depart the city in the first place: financial ruin, betrayal by his wife, severed ties to his twin. He’s come home, but finds no succor or safety here, just the ruination of the last thing he thought he owned and a feeling of being abandoned by man and nature alike. And when he sees the local priest, Kadiye (Chiké Okonkwo), thriving, Igwezu’s despair might bring him to a radical act. 

People come and go over the course of the play, but Jason Ardizzone-West’s set, a dust-brown wood cabin suspended in a black plain, conveys the isolation and self-sufficiency of this family; they are literally at the end of the river, the last place humans live before the swamp takes all. As the play begins, Alu and Makuri are both working, Makuri weaving a basket and Alu working with fabric; they’re keeping their hands busy while they wait for Igwezu, yes, but they’re also engaged in what they need to do to keep their family afloat. Makuri and Igwezu work as barbers as well; Igwezu has had a barber’s chair sent to the village with great difficulty and expense. Rena Anakwe’s sound design and Seth Reiser’s lights, too, bring a sense of place: moisture-filled air with light cutting through it hazily; the whine of flies and the sounds of water. 

Timpo has the ensemble playing like an orchestra, with Makuri and Alu as the bass foundation and Igwezu’s and the Beggar’s journeys melodies in counterpoint. Leon Addison Brown brings a gentle wit to Makuri, balanced by a tenderness toward his wife and son; Jenny Jules shows the resonance of Alu’s fear for her sons–an emotional shade that we miss when Alu goes to bed and leaves the action midway through, a miss. Ato Blankson-Wood’s Igwezu at first seems numb, then slowly reveals builds to depths of heartbreak and rage. Joshua Echebiri’s Beggar has an arc in the opposite direction: from rootlessness, revealing a sense of purpose and a belief that he will better his lot. And Chiké Okonkwo’s Kadiye adds discordant chords as the Beggar sows doubt about his rectitude. 

According to a program note, Adrienne Kennedy introduced this play to Theater for a New Audience’s artistic director, and the sense of melody in the character interactions, the archetypes beneath the real, the omnipresence of the mythic, are features that remind me of Kennedy. But it’s the sense of climate apocalypse, the dependence of this community on a location that can no longer be counted on, that makes the play feel truly relevant in contemporary America.