Oroonoko Resonates With Startling Physicality

At the Duke on 42nd Street, Oroonoko sets the stage for a collision of continents, ethics, and ideologies through its exploration of race relations and slavery in the 17th century.

Biyi Bandele’s Oroonoko tells about the struggle of a young African prince and his bride, first at the hands of their own tyrannical leader and then as victims of the European slave trade. The play is Bandele’s adaptation of Aphra Behn’s 1688 novella of the same name. Behn, arguably Europe’s first recognized female author, interweaves African slave stories to produce a tragic narrative about their experience, and the translation from literature to stage succeeds in amplifying the emotional impact of the work by emphasizing the physicality of its content.

The production achieves a level of heart-wrenching poignancy through depictions of intense torture in a few haunting scenes. Under the direction of Kate Whoriskey, fight choreographer Rick Sordelet succeeds in orchestrating an almost cinematic brutality on the stage. His representations affect severe discomfort, if not the compulsion to look away from the spectacle.

These are the moments in which the nature of oppression is captured on stage, and thus are the moments that lend the production its emotional power. The first particularly memorable scene occurs when Prince Oroonoko’s fiancée, Imoinda (Toi Perkins), is abducted and forced to sleep with Kabiyesi (Ira Hawkins), the acting king and Oroonoko’s grandfather. The second occurs as the slave traders drag the Africans gasping and moaning from the ship to the auction blocks. The captive men and women emerge from beneath the stage clinging desperately to one another, barely able to stand and clothed minimally in strips of dirty cloth. The violence and despair of these moments exaggerate the dehumanization and physical manifestations of anguish that Imoinda, Oroonoko (Albert Jones), and his warriors collectively experience.

They also provide a disturbing contrast to the warriors’ vibrant costumes and the strength and exuberance of their dance at the beginning of the production. The thin, white slip that Imoinda is forced to wear as a slave to both Kabiyesi and the British Captain Stanmore functions as a perpetually painful reminder of her wedding dress.
By establishing these aesthetic oppositions between the first and second halves of the play, Whoriskey draws further attention to the magnitude of loss that the characters, and consequently the audience, experience during the play. Not only do the actors’ movements and costumes reflect their depravity, but the sets crafted by John Arnone are also completely altered. The transition, from richly colored tapestries and art to the stark pillars on the auction block and, later, the shanties where the slaves are forced to live, represents the complete destruction of culture that occurs as a result of the institution.

One questionable aspect of Bandele’s adaptation is his incorporation of contemporary sexual innuendo and humor throughout the first half of the play. While certainly amusing, in retrospect it seems completely inconsistent with the larger message of the production. The subsequent seriousness of the treatment of the body—and particularly its violation—makes Bandele’s earlier humor seem inappropriate and counterproductive. While it can be seen as an attempt to make the play more entertaining to a modern audience, it can also be seen to clash with a narrative otherwise firmly rooted in a distinct culture, place, and historical moment.

Yet this shortcoming is easy enough to overlook, particularly as you walk away emotionally shattered by the final scenes of the play—Oroonoko leaves the audience viscerally and intellectually horrified