| . | 02/29/2008
Oroonoko
By: Victor Gluck
LeRoy McClain, Ezra Knight and Albert Jones as Oroonoko
(photo credit: Gerry Goodstein)
As part of a season called “Africa, Europe, America: Exploring the Connections,” Theater for a New Audience is presenting the United States premiere of Nigerian playwright Biyi Bandele’s adaptation of Aphra Behn’s 1688 novella, Oroonoko. Although the play was first presented at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1999, it has taken another six years for this collaboration between Bandele and TFANA to come about.
Aphra Behn’s life was even more fascinating that her fiction. Born in 1640 in England, by age 23 she was a spy for King Charles II visiting both Surinam (later Dutch Guinea) and Antwerp. She then returned to London and became the first English professional writer with about a dozen produced stage plays to her credit, as well as fame for her erotic poetry and translations. Towards the end of her life she turned to fiction and published Oroonoko, partially based on her experiences in Surinam, in the year before she died. Although the novella was a success, it was made even more popular in 1696, seven years after her death at 49, when it was turned into a stage play by Thomas Southerne. In the following century, Oroonoko was again timely as part of the debate for and against the slave trade. In recent years, Behn has been rediscovered with revivals of her Restoration comedies, The Rover and The Lucky Chance, revealing that 17th century women writers were as witty and ribald as their male counterparts.
As originally written by Behn, Oroonoko is a strange choice for stage adaptation as the novella has almost no dialogue and has many digressions describing the geography and natural history of Surinam. Bandele’s connection with the piece began when he was asked to write an introductory monologue to a R.S.C. revival of the Southerne play. He instead chose to write a new play, returning to the Behn novella to create an Act I set in Africa and missing from Southerne’s version, and adapting Southerne’s play for his Act II, depicting the Surinam half of Behn’s work. Bandele has chosen to emphasize the love story of Prince Oronooko and Princess Imoinda, rather than the more obvious choices of a polemic against slavery or an action-based thriller.
Although the storytelling is absorbing, Kate Whoriskey’s production suffers from a case of familiarity:
the first act plays like a fairy tale from the Arabian Nights and the second half resembles many previous tales of slave revolts in the U.S. or the Caribbean. Even the sumptuous African costumes designed by Emilio Sosa and the original music of drums and percussion composed by Juwon Ogungbe cannot disguise the feeling that we have heard this story before. Though poetic, the language of the play both for its African and Surinam sections seems more European than evocative of its settings. The play’s authenticity seems somewhat vitiated by the fact that the characters sound like they are out of a post-Shakespeare text rather than a translation of an unknown African or South American work.
Nevertheless, the passion and sweep of Whoriskey’s staging, with choroegraphy by Warren Adams, keeps the action moving swiftly along. Set in Coramantien, an historic English and Dutch trading post in what is now described variously as Ghana or Nigeria, Oroonoko tells the story of the titular prince an heir to the throne who returns home from local wars to find his grandfather, the elderly king, entirely under the thumb of the ambitious and deceitful advisor Orombo. Falling in love with Imoinda, the beautiful orphaned daughter of his late general, Oroonoko comes into conflict with both his grandfather’s desires and Orombo’s plans. In the second half, both Oroonoko (renamed Caesar) and Imoinda, unknown to each other, have been sold into slavery and transported to the English West Indies colony of Surinam. There they are confronted with a greedy sea captain, a lascivious official, and a noble colonist. The tragedy that results leaves none of the characters unscathed.
Like many romantic works from Romeo and Juliet on, the leading characters are not half as colorful and entertaining as the supporting players. John Douglas Thompson’s juicy portrayal of the corrupt Orombo steals every scene he is in. The most complex character may well be Christen Simon as the king’s cast-off mistress Lady Onola, a woman though past her prime can give as good as she gets both in her repartee as well as in her plotting. The senile but lascivious King Kabiyesi is given a vivid portrayal by Ira Hawkins.
Albert Jones makes a stalwart but bland hero, while Toi Perkins is a lovely though familiarly virginal heroine. As their staunch friend and warrior Aboan, LeRoy McClain also stands out in a cast that except for the two leads double and triple in the course of the evening. As the English authority figures in Surinam, Gregory Derelian, David Barlow and Graeme Malcolm are unable to raise their scripted characterizations above their stereotypes. Mar Gueye performing lead drums and percussion adds appreciably to the excitement and drama of the story, while Rick Sordelet’s fight choreography is particularly memorable in all of the play’s battle scenes.
The new adaptation of Apha Behn’s Oroonoko is an ambitious undertaking but the results are a combination of the familiar and the exotic. A literary landmark in its own time and a minor classic today, Oroonoko deserves to be better known as the first fictional depiction of African life below the Sahara in English.
Oroonoko (through March 9)
Theatre for a New Audience at The Duke on 42nd Street, 229 W. 42nd St., in Manhattan
For tickets, call 646-223-3010 or http://www.tfana.org
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