NEW YORK: In 'Oroonoko,' Biyi Bandele recasts story of African slavery

Biyi Bandele comes bearing human cargo. Bandele, a playwright and novelist born in Nigeria, now a resident of England, for a long while wrote mainly about the lives he knew in both.

But when the Royal Shakespeare Company had the idea of involving him in a production of "Oroonoko," the play by the Restoration dramatist Thomas Southerne based on Aphra Behn's famous novel of the period, Bandele plunged deep into matters of history, responsibility, power, choices of the heart and the fickleness of freedom. He emerged in 1999 with a new work about Africa and slavery; about slave takers, who are African, and slave traders, who are white.

His "Oroonoko," which ran for a year and a half, sold out its performances at the Other Place, the Royal Shakespeare Company's alternative theater space at the time.

Now Theater for a New Audience is introducing the play in the United States. Starring Albert Jones as the not un-Shakespearean soldier prince, Oroonoko, and directed by Kate Whoriskey, it opened last Sunday at the Duke theater in New York.

Bandele, 40, often visits New York, where he has many friends in theater and among writers. But he said he was not entirely sure how "Oroonoko," which deliberately avoids taking sides along racial lines, would be received by an American audience.

"There were nights at the RSC when the audience was predominantly American because of tourist season," he said, "a mixture of black and white, and the response was always very emotional. At the end people would come out like this." Bandele touched a hand to his face in a gesture of crying. (Reviewers have not been as moved. Charles Isherwood, writing in The New York Times, called it "a strangely bland if superficially exotic work of theater.")

But his portrayal of captive Africans transported into bondage doesn't spark strong emotions "by being told the usual way," said Jeffrey Horowitz, the company's artistic director, "with whites just being the oppressors and Africans the oppressed. It presents the conflict of the individual and society not in terms of race but of choice and missed chances. There are grotesques on both sides. And self-interest. No one is just good or just evil."

Oroonoko's end is tragic not simply because of the gruesome violence unleashed on him and his young love, Imoinda, or the slavery system that such brutality reinforces, but because it is entwined, Bandele said, with the insights and regrets that self-awareness brings.

"I wanted Oroonoko's humanity and flaws to come through," he said.

From the start of the first act, stylized court ritual, dance and music help raise the emotional temperature even before the action moves, in the second act, to the hellish colonial setting of Surinam. The African courtiers' poetic flourishes, high-flying figurative language and erotic banter are drawn, Bandele said, from Nigeria's mythological and literary past.

As a northern Nigerian enamored of his family roots in the Yoruba south, he said, he has also infused the dialogue with "the way my aunts and uncles talked, which always had a proverb, always had a story woven in, though when they spoke, it was completely spontaneous."

In the second act Bandele, while relying on some of the same plot points as the Southerne play, used them to illuminate characters and relationships differently. To Brent Edwards, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University who specializes in African diaspora studies, mutating literature in this way "can be a form of resistance."

"When you have been imagined as the 'other,' " he said, "it's a way to wrest back control." Bandele's earliest experiences of prejudice and discrimination stemmed from his upbringing as a Christian in a largely Muslim region, he said. "All a Muslim had to hear was my name to know I wasn't Muslim," he said, "and I immediately became a second-class citizen. For me that is the scariest racism: tribalism."

His family's Protestant faith stretches far back on his mother's side. A great-great-great-grandfather "apparently was captured and sold into slavery," he said, "but later returned as a Christian missionary."

Behn, a trailblazer in her own right, made, according to her account, a round trip under more privileged circumstances, living for a time in slaveholding Surinam in the 1660s.

As a result "she created in Oroonoko a kind of James Bond figure, a Superman, not because she was an abolitionist, but because she felt that the institution of slavery was inhuman, and she had to exaggerate his abilities to counter the argument that certain people deserved to be slaves because they were less than human," Bandele said. "But it was an issue of rank for her. Oroonoko didn't deserve to be enslaved because he was a prince."

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