The Black Rep got on Wole Soyinka’s dance card during his visit to Carbondale this past weekend because it is staging his play Death and the King’s Horseman March 19-April 13. But when Soyinka took the stage at the Grandel Theatre on Saturday morning, he momentarily was inhabiting the set for the Black Rep’s current production of August Wilson’s Radio Golf.
The strange setting was strangely appropriate for this playwright and public intellectual, who comfortably straddles many worlds. Born in Nigeria and educated there and in London, Soyinka (the 1986 Nobel laureate in literature) also has called various academic settings in the U.S. home, and his many creations in drama, memoir, fiction, poetry and polemic now belong to the world.
Soyinka spoke for more than an hour in an informal conversation moderated by Robert Henke, chair of the Performing Arts Department at Washington University (which is staging Soyinka’s play The Lion and the Jewel April 18-27 under the direction of Ron Himes).
Henke got the playwright talking about the Soyinka play his department is staging. “The Lion and the Jewel had an almost ridiculous stimulus – I owe its birth to Charlie Chaplin,” Soyinka said.
“I picked up the news that Charlie Chaplin had married Una, who was much, much younger than himself. This meant something tremendous: that Europeans do the same things we do at home, that our chiefs do.”
Soyinka said that Death and the King’s Horseman also has a curiously European origin.
“What evoked that play was a bust of Winston Churchill at the top of the stairs at Churchill College, Cambridge, where I was teaching – Mr. British bulldog, this figure of British Empire. I saw this bust there every day, and I had this overwhelming desire to give it a push, day after day,” Soyinka said.
“Then I looked at it one day and thought: These were the people who took entire cultures over and, in many cases, brought them to heel without even trying to develop or take into account what was already there – and they actually got away with it!”
The Black Rep’s production of Death and the King’s Horseman is directed by Segun Ojewuyi, a member of the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale Department of Theatre faculty, rather than Soyinka or Himes. (Himes does play Elesin, the lead role.) But Soyinka remembered several past challenges he had encountered when directing the play.
“When I was directing Death and the King’s Horseman in Chicago and at Lincoln Center in New York, on both occasions when we came to the trance scene when the main character is supposed to dance himself into a trance and the ancestral world, actors on the stage of both sexes used to go under,” Soyinka said.
“I had to orchestrate the action in such a way to get off the stage the actors who were the most vulnerable. Once or twice, a couple of people in the audience experienced the same effect. That’s the combination of drumming and certain harmonics at work.”
He also said he has been required to do additional work with African-American actors, convincing them that being of African descent did not give them immediate access to the Yoruba world of his drama.
“I have had this problem (which other directors have had also) when I have staged Death and the King’s Horseman with African-American actors,” Soyinka said.
“They think they are already within the center of the play, and the director has to tear his hair out convincing them they do have to work just as hard as non-black actors to inhabit the world, as opposed to intuitively being given a cultural visa to enter.”
The Yoruba culture in which Soyinka was raised is legendary for its complex philosophy and religion and its rich cultural resources in every media imaginable, including language. Soyinka spoke a bit about this.
“Yoruba is a very densely poetic culture. Poetry permeates everything, even the hawker’s cry,” Soyinka said.
“We hear inventiveness and lyricism even in the hawker’s cry, what I grew up on. Every day, for the same product, a novelty, a novel cry.”
(Henke cleverly contrasted this poetic “hawker’s cry” with the beer man’s repetitive pitch at a ball game.)
Sitting on the set of Radio Golf, it was fitting that Soyinka mused about the name the Yoruba gave to the radio when they first encountered it, which translates as: “he who speaks without waiting for a reply.”
Soyinka spoke on Saturday morning tirelessly as a radio. But, unlike the Yoruba radio, he waited patiently for questions and exchanges. Everyone in the room – a fascinating audience that included Margaret Bush Wilson, Eugene B. Redmond, Donald M. Suggs, K. Curtis Lyle, Shirle LeFlore, Michael Castro, John Baugh, Joe Pollack and Himes – was sorry when the poet had to leave us to catch his flight out of town.
He left behind one thought about duality that I have found liberating. Soyinka was responding to a young student from Washington University, who was born in the U.S. to Nigerian parents. He had asked if Soyinka felt torn between the potentially competing identities of Yoruba vs. Nigerian vs. African.
It was a potent question in a roomful of people who have all thought about W.E.B. DuBois and the dual consciousness of black Americans.
“They are intersecting circles, not concentric circles,” Soyinka said.
“There is that duality within, that wedge of intersection. This is, for me, quite rich.”
Death and the King’s Horseman plays at the Grandel Theatre from March 19 – April 13. Radio Golf closes Sunday. Call (314) 534-3810 or visit www.theblackrep.org.
