THE SWAMP DWELLERS & Kosky’s THREEPENNY OPERA — Review Roundup
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In a rare treat of African theater in New York, director Awoye Timpo stages the pitch-perfect off-Broadway debut of Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s 1958 play, The Swamp Dwellers at the Theatre for a New Audience. It’s a production sharply attuned to the work’s mysterious rhythms, built, like its stilt house set, atop a delicate and inevitable flow of deliberately paced revelations.
The 70-minute piece begins with a rural barber, Makuri (Leon Addison Brown), and his wife, Alu (Jenny Jules), awaiting the return of one of their twin sons, Igwezu, who followed his unseen brother to the big city but has returned to check on some nearby crops he owns during the flooding season. As they wait, a blind man (Joshua Echebiri) born to a nearby “village of beggars” appears. Through their welcoming interactions, details about each of their beliefs, and how they apply or not to the region’s ruling systems, are revealed; he is Muslim, they follow the Yoruba faith. Eventually Igwezu (Ato Blankson-Wood) appears, though he is preceded by Kadiye (Chiké Okonkwo), a local, powerful holy man, and two attendants (Jason Maina and Olawale Oyenola). The politician-priest boasts of his power and demands a shave, completely at odds with an Igwezu who has seen life beyond the township and knows of devastation to come.
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Jason Ardizzone-West’s set renders the skeleton of the couple’s house just above the audience, whose feet touch a lacquered black floor which evokes moving water, as does Rena Anakwe’s sound design. Qween Jean’s costumes are typically excellent, especially for Jules. Though Brown and Jules’ amiable banter provides a recognizable human backbone to the proceedings, it becomes clear Alu was not written to be a leading player in this otherwise all-male world, and it is to Jules and Timpo’s credit that her housewife feels like a matriarch.
The work, and this production, are haunting: the type of theatre that washes over you with the smooth surf of uneventfulness but leaves a memorable psychic dent in its wake. Each character begins as a stand-in for something – the stranger’s blindness conjures clairvoyance, and the son’s standoffishness hints at modernity – although for just what is never simplified, and is only complicated by their actions. Small details, such as when the beggar chooses to open, or keep closed, his clouded eyes, or the way the central couple react in slightly skewed synchronicity, are tough to parse but even harder to forget. Timpo ties their enigmatic power to the play’s own cryptic disquietude for an unshakeable, if at times puzzling, effect.
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As for what played across the street at BAM’s Opera House for a few dates earlier this month, what could I possibly add to the heaps of praise already lavished on Barry Kosky’s staging of The Threepenny Opera? Somehow the Berliner Ensemble current director’s first New York premiere, it arrived with maxed-out anticipation (I’d never seen the lobby abuzz like that) and managed to exceed expectations. The cast was uniformly but distinctly perfect, though I’ll shout out Laura Balzar’s Lucy, who emerged as the story's emotional backbone in a way that neither disrupted its distancing effect nor called attention to itself, despite her gorgeous renditions of “Pirate Jenny” and “Barbara Song.” And that was essentially the production’s overall tone: a taught tightrope between enjoyable talent and social excoriation that fit an era where everyone performs luxury. Set on a jungle gym-like scaffolding set on which the characters reconfigured themselves, in ways inventive in their inevitability, it presented the 1928 story (by Bertolt Brecht, from the original John Gay, with music by Kurt Weill) with a showbiz panache both Vegas sleazy and top-of-the-line. Perhaps the sparkly curtains that sometimes covered it are Kosky’s nod to Chicago’s “Hot Honey Rag,” whose cynical razzle-dazzle was itself a throwback to Brecht’s ‘20s, and which he staged in 2023. Whatever the case, he’s welcome back anytime.
The Swamp Dwellers is in performance through April 27, 2025 at Theatre for a New Audience on Ashland Place in Brooklyn, New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.
