Review: The Swamp Dwellers Combines Myth and Modernity in a Taut Drama

The main character of Jordan Peele’s Nope asks, “What’s a bad miracle? They got a word for that?” After watching The Swamp Dwellers, now making its off-Broadway debut with Theatre for a New Audience, you might think that its characters must have a word for it. Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka’s taut, bewitching drama about a 1950s African family facing an uncertain future is full of bad miracles, causing problems that leave his characters with no easy solutions.

With our own future full of dark uncertainties about climate change, political upheaval, and resources hoarded by the wealthy, the play feels like a warning for today as much as for the past. But the answers we are supposed to take from it are as murky as the fog enveloping the characters’ home.

Director Awoye Timpo and a pitch-perfect cast slowly crank up the intensity, balancing knife-edge tension with a deeply metaphorical story. Makuri (Leon Addison Brown), a barber, and his wife, Alu (Jenny Jules) live on the edge of a swamp. Their house is the last one on the river because of the unstable ground. They have adult twin sons who left for the city to find work: Igwezu (Ato Blankson-Wood) and Awuchike, who left first and hasn’t been heard from in years. Alu fears he is dead. Igwezu, however, has come back a changed man, barely saying hello to his parents before heading out to check on the crops he maintains on the property.

But Alu is in a panic because, according to Yoruba myth, if one twin dies, the other does too (bad miracle). Part of the risk she fears is spiritual, coming from the Swamp Serpent, an ancient and dangerous god. Another risk is more practical: the rising swamp waters that flood their land and home. Despite these threats, Makuri and Alu support each other through teasing and affection. Meanwhile, a mysterious beggar (Joshua Echebiri) appears out of the fog. Why did he walk the entire length of the river to get to this house? And why is he so adamant in refusing alms from the Kadiye (Chiké Okonkwo), the priest who is supposedly keeping the swamp snake at bay?

Addison Brown and Jules’s performances skillfully balance humor with a deeper, serious subtext. Echebiri, whose character remains a mystery, brings realism and empathy to a challenging role. Okonkwo’s entrances as Kadiye are one of the more menacing things I’ve experienced in a play. He is accompanied everywhere he goes by a drummer, and the incessant beat grows ever louder and seems to portend the bleak future coming for the characters. A scene between the Okonkwo and Blankson-Wood is a nerve-racking climax well-played by both actors, though I would have loved to see more of Blankson-Wood, who gives an arresting performance but appears only briefly.

There’s specific historical background to The Swamp Dwellers. Oil wells brought wealth to some privileged Nigerians while destroying the land and livelihood of subsistence farmers. But the play eschews the specifics, focusing instead on mythical elements that can apply to any time. A son assumed dead is found alive. A huge harvest grows after a drought. Watching these things twist from good fortune to bad miracles is a thrill.

The production seamlessly highlights the play’s best elements and obscures its limitations as a one-act (it runs 70 minutes). Jason Ardizzone-West’s set gives the convincing illusion of wet swampland beneath the floors of the house. Lighting by Seth Reiser effectively shows the transitions of time and weather. The rain sound effects by Rena Anakwe threaten to overwhelm the actors’ voices in the first few minutes, but the sound soon pulls back so we can hear. And Qween Jean’s costumes were expressive of both the characters and their culture.

The characters of The Swamp Dwellers are living through a moment of great change. Their traditional life must be discarded because of false promises, but modernity doesn’t offer much hope either. The Swamp Dwellers makes these issues into exciting, beguiling theater.