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FEMIOSOFISAN’SESUANDTHE
VAGABONDMINSTRELSTOA
PRODUCTIONFORHARBACHTHEATER
Ethan Wedel
The central question of Femi Osofisan’s Esu and the
Vagabond Minstrels is this: Which sensibility—African or
Western—is the author of the drama? As the west runs into the
future, it leaves Africa and its past (“those days…[when] there was
a different god in this land”) behind in a post-colonial malaise
(the age of the “locusts…[come] to power”). Osofisan is therefore
caught in a temporal conundrum about how best to presently
proceed: Should Africa (for him, Nigeria) abandon the west and
return to its pre-colonial roots, or abandon the pre-colonial and
go forward into a future increasingly defined by the west? Both the
man and the artistic institution he represents are caught amid the
throes of a struggle between two different strategies for organizing
power, sprung from disparate theories about the appropriate
degree of distance between actors and audience—the proper
approach to “populist” (“escapist”), and elitist (“educational”)
art (Rubin 469). This split is embodied by the schism between
Esu’s first—emblematic of a traditional African theater of
egalitarian, horizontal organization “integrated into the life of
the community,” mixing populism and elitism—and second and
third scenes—characteristic of a hierarchical, vertically organized
Western tradition of “discrete events,” separating populism and
elitism (Brockett 666). The “competition”—Esu’s raison d’etre—
is a performance of the ideological competition between East and
West for the audience, and thereby the heritage, of Africa.
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Osofisan rejects the conundrum as a false choice, and
tries to amalgamate the two strategies. Unlike critics who argue
that his drama is an attempt to utterly “refute Western ideology
[and] foreign ideological hegemony,’” I will contend that it
creates a “crossover form” (the action, as in The Dilemma of a
Ghost, actually occurs at a crossroads) (Rubin 469); the play is a
“‘rendezvous’” designed—not to excise the west—but to co-opt
it, to pull it into synchronicity with contemporized pre-colonial
traditions (Cabral qtd in Okur). Osofisan realizes that while he
and his theater must return to and re-colonize the space from
which they were long ago displaced (1472, if one takes the date of
first contact with Portuguese navigators (BBC Timeline: Nigeria)),
the old space has been irrevocably changed in the interregnum
since displacement. Osofisan can neither wholly recover nor
abandon his priceless past; he can neither wholly repudiate,
nor ignore an inured west. By shifting, within each scene, the
balance of power between author, actors, and audience (which
itself mirrors, in the populist-audience/elitist-author split, the
distance between the vertical/horizontal), Osofisan plays-out this
personal, social, and artistic civil war. To this end, in the fourth
section of Esu, he makes the balance ambiguous; integrating both
approaches by destroying each and collapsing them into one
another, he manages to create an Africanized Western Tradition
and a modernized pre-colonial past. He revives the social space of
which theater is a microcosm by erecting a fourth wall, and then
shattering it.
The practical challenge of the production design is
how to adapt a play intended for the round to Harbach’s
proscenium stage—how, as Professor Choma’s introduction to
the presentations of his scenic-design class has it, to “ponder
theatrical space…manipulate it in order to tell a story through
the [created environment].” In translation from page to stage,
the philosophical conundrum, then, is the release of “that energy
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which may be conveyed by silence as much as speech” (Nye lix).
The salient issue for me in my rendering(s) of the text will be,
in keeping with the play’s salient themes: the manipulation of
set, seating arrangements, and costuming to convey the distance
intended in each section between audience and actors. That
is, which component—author (demiurge of the drama), actors
(interpreters thereof ), audience (watchers or participants)—is
dominant and so which ideology/strategy is favored? Each
paragraph will treat the text first, and the method of performance
second.
Orchestra has certain elements of a hybrid form.
It contains an orchestra adapted from the Western institution
(think for a moment of the difference between a wind ensemble
[
] and dialect song [Jo mi jo!]), and a dispensation
for costumes (concession to “embellishment” and distancing
over a return to “final things”). Nevertheless, the scene is heavily
dominated by the audience, and therefore representative of a more
traditional African mode.
The play begins literally sunk into shared space: Osofisan
specifies that the first players may be from “any community,” and,
at scene’s end, there is “no real separation between the players
and the assembled audience.” In beginning with the fourth wall
down—in exposing first the “Orchestra” and then the Overture
played thereby—the mechanism for sound and story is laid bare
before being covered with an assonant skin (the story itself ). The
principle of communal integration (the pre-colonial) is put into
a “modern context” with a political polemic (Irele 628)—made
a supra-political and thus super-political means of “liberating
traditions” from the past. The Orchestra’s lamentation of
contemporary and historical corruption—“The Song of Khaki and
Agbada”—places an invocation of the “Khaki” (Fashioning Africa
125) uniforms of the soldiers and the “Agbada” (Adire African
Textiles.com) robes of those kings who ruled much of Nigeria’s
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post-independence period (1960-1999) alongside an exposition
of the excess and agency of the government-set: “He don shop de
treasury/He buy jet for Mecca/Fly to Rome for shopping.” The
critique is accentuated by a litany about the absence of change
and the state’s dysfunction: “Khaki and Agbada/De two de waka
together/Khaki come to power/Imitate Agbada!”
The players, however, delve through the egg-shell
façade of governments into the living roots of actual power:
the community and its stories. The people’s cultural continuity,
removed from coups d’etat, has no regard for political context.
The “fighting over there in the capital,” says the fictional
director of Osofisan’s communal play-within-a-play, “doesn’t
concern us”—“we” the rural bastions of culture (the theaters)
which underlie (and, by implication, always have underlain) the
“perverted logic” of dominance of whatever sort in whatever age
(Fannon 210). The act of speaking into barrenness, which is the
community’s work, turns on that which “turns to the past of the
oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it” (Fannon
212). (plays the orchestra): “Man go suffer…Farm go dry…But, I
too dey talk—talk/With my mouth like shovel/And I go henter for
trouble.” The political affirmation immediately nestles itself into
the evocation of an ancient, subversive god—“Esu, the dreaded
god of mischief”—the actors stand metaphorically at a crossroads
(a coup d’etat, a conference, a rivalry, intimations of political
foment): “A crossroads, which as you all know is Esu’s homing
ground!” Hence, the community departs from their present to
their past, lifts the ancient well of tradition into public life and
visa-versa; the horizontal strategy is reaffirmed.
The performance of Orchestra would be profoundly
challenging because it requires the resolution of an essentially
insuperable problem: How to avoid making the scene either too
strange or too familiar? The show’s beginning should fill the entire
life-space of the audience—from the moment someone steps into
CFA, he or she should feel simultaneously the ease of an informal
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gathering and the tension of a formal social event. The community
should be felt to be Knox College—the director (here substituted
for “Chief”), and all non-acting personnel should call each other
by their first names; everyone should mingle freely with the
audience. The performance should begin in the auditorium with
drinks and refreshments served by “younger men and women”
(possibly Galesburg High or elementary school students) from
familiar dishware as a substitutes (for the sake of avoiding cliché
and “exoticism”) for “calabash cup[s]…large gourds.” It should
then be indicated that everyone is to proceed into Harbach, where
the first thing seen will be a large red curtain suspended from
the ceiling, cordoning off the stage from the seats while leaving
the isle between seats and stage open; as an audience member
passes through the curtain they should get the feeling that they are
entering a new world, leaving the auditorium behind as though it
were unimportant to the community of spectators.
The stage itself should be completely bare, stripped of all
accoutrements except the implements of technical theater such
that it looks like the pre-performance period of a production. DSL
there should be a “slightly raised platform” containing a table, and
behind the table, taking the place of “community leaders,” three to
five professors (either culled from the audience or gently induced
to participation via pleading or culinary bribery) should watch the
entire performance. The stage, the wings, and its environs should
be filled by the audience—as many persons as is legally feasible—
and the air should be filled with communal sounds—“chanting,
quarreling, bantering, etc.” Cushions and chairs should be spread
haphazardly around the set, and audience members should be
encouraged to sit wherever they wish, until the director designates
a space to be cleared for the crossroads. However, as the action
commences, the specific names of fictional characters should be
retained in order to reinforce the audience’s sense of “otherness”
melting into “us-ness”, which would be both a mirror for the
play’s division between west and east, and a tool for furthering
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the sense of cognitive dissonance received from stepping into
the play-space. Actors should nevertheless begin the show in
their street-clothes. There should be a general sense as the action
commences—sprung from 1) the lack of pretense, 2) the subtle
pretense of the acting, and 3) the fact that the audience is asked
to act as society (members of a community center)—that these are
familiar people simply viewed in a new context while indulging an
old, heretofore mysterious, habit. The objective is to ameliorate,
or at least dampen, the inevitable dissonance of difference by
building a milieu of normalcy. A circular space 20-30 feet in
diameter (opened in any part of the stage by the Chief’s “clear the
center here please; that will be our stage”) should be set aside for
the next scene.
Overture and Opium contain elements of the African
strategy’s “totality of theatrical form”: the elitism of the ostensible
morality play (the didacticism of Redio’s “Governments are not
eternal”) is mingled with its entertaining populist counterpart
(the engrossing fable played-out between god and men) (Rubin
469). That dichotomy typical of the Western vertical structure—
division between the players on high and the audience below—is
nevertheless paramount. The balance of power shifts here to
the actors—it is they who set the internal logic of the play by
appearing, as members of the community center, to have been
wholly lost inside both character and the occupied fictive world.
Osofisan’s stage directions at the beginning of Overture
indicate a sudden electrical-arcing jump between realities. The
stage directions before Hangover (scene four) henceforth reference
only the world of the play-within-a-play; they don’t describe the
stage. In the beginning, “the [stage] lights come up” (the house
lights should go down, everything in darkness except the 20-30
foot circle) and become, thence, (actual) “dawn. Later clearing
into morning”—the “A crossroads” illuminated on 365 (a facet of
the landscape) is clearly not the same “A crossroads” referenced
on 364 (the Chief’s prop placed “right here” at his command).
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The playwright’s birthing of this new world (broken from the
community which vanishes from specific reference in the text as
the crossroads becomes corporeal) is paralleled by Esu’s birth
(his arrival) therein; compelled by the incantatory harmony
of Redio, Sinsin, Omele, Epo, Jiji (though thematically similar
[“We’ve been pushed down the well of despair”], an obvious
break [the supplication of the god] from the first song [an elegy
by the people]), “hooded figures begin around the signboard to
come alive and the static figure of the signboard begins to shake,
till a man gradually emerges from it” (i.e. the wood itself ) “in a
cloud of smoke and fire”. As readers, these guidelines break us
imaginatively through the space we first inhabited by mixing the
fictive with the “real”; we envision—not the stage-image of the
community center—but vivid pictures from another world—a
different place, locus of difference, an amniotic encounter. As
the audience passed through a physical veil (the overhanging
sheet) to reach the stage, a metaphysical veil is traversed into a
transmogrified physical space.
This rupture allows scene three, Opium, to add a
further stratum of cognitive dissonance to the audience’s already
dissonant conception of their position (near, far; familiar,
unfamiliar). Another metaphysical veil—the one between actors’
and characters’ personality—is transgressed. As the world we
knew gets lost (falls, intoxicated, into the thrall of the small,
“impromptu” stage), so too do the actors who we know go astray
inside their characters; as we never return to the community
center, they never emerge from their donned identities. These are
never again the theatrical persons—that Esu, and “your men” who
become spirits— positioned by the Chief’s command—“come on,
take position now…”. The chief, indeed, never appears again, and
so seems (as we ourselves might seem to ourselves) to have been
quashed from existence by the world which he (and we) helped
create. Actors, intoxicated by the opioid (hence the title) of the
western “aesthetic experience[’s]” discrete appeal (Irele 631), fall
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into their characters even as those characters are intoxicated by
their powers—their capacity to obtain things (Sinisn: “ I’m dying
to be rich!”). The final result should be similar to whimsical
psychotic confusion; realities, like bloated rivers, flow into one
another.
As our boundaries disappear, we are twice asked to
willingly suspend our capacity for disbelief: impelled first to
think that we are in a community center with Ade, the Chief, the
Orchestra, and second to imagine that we, invisible, are occupying
the crossroads’ world with the five vagabonds, the sufferers, Esu
and his entourage. By clarifying the power hierarchy, Osofisan
makes it unclear which universe we’re supposed to be living in.
As we find ourselves watching an increasingly “discrete event,”
we also discover that that event, this fictive-real, is a collapsed
community. Consequently, we find that we have returned to the
space from which Osofisan and his fathers (poetic and familial)
were displaced (figuratively and physically): “Where I was born
and raised, how,” wonders one of the minstrels, “could I have
known that the place had changed so much…How could I have
foreseen it, that a day would come when these same people, would
see men in torment, and drive them back into the wind?”
The attempt to transition from Orchestra to Overture
creates discord; as the political polemic extant in Orchestra is
over-emphasized—abandoning traditional form—it becomes mere
hollow, howling, useless lecture given in the face of dire need. (as
articulated by Epo Oyinbo): “is this the time for sermons?...I’m
starving!” Pragmatic change, Osofisan’s characters suggest, must
occur, and the first step to that change is a rapprochement with the
legacy of the west. The living roots of true power are shriveling
and starving. Hunger for meaning, for food, and for food because
of the lack of stability which meaning might bring, “makes life
meaningless” as does the void opened by the colonial past: the
“emptying [of ] the native’s brain of all form and content” (Fannon
211). As usual, “fighting over there in the capital... doesn’t concern
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us” (the Chief ) “…someday there’ll be another [government]”
(Redio). “But first” (rather than thriving and putting on a play)
“we must survive, which means we must eat” (we might read: ‘our
Western heritage’).
The “energy…silence” of the hidden force behind the
performance indicate that a staging would simultaneously enact a
collapse and the building of a hierarchy. In an ideal presentation,
the central principle of the middle two scenes should therefore be
the construction of a stage by the actors in ironic accordance with
the minstrels’ return to political agitation in Hangover: “REDIO:
LET US BUILD, FOR WE CAN BUILD. MINSTRELS: FOR WE
CAN BUILD!”. The community’s activity, when under the sway
of that twin identity-strain endemic to, and un-reconciled with, its
schismatic self, could thus be seen as a tool for the subversion of
communalism. This would require nothing more than a physical
elaboration of the space cleared by the Chief in the first scene; the
new “stage” should perhaps be elevated slightly with risers, and
an extra platform for the orchestra, similar to the one which the
professors occupy, could come up from beneath or down from
above the stage. There should be a radical departure in the stage’s
physical form immediately after Orchestra; Opium ought to mark
the gradual solidification of distance between audience and actors.
The technical flotsam of the bare space should be incrementally
removed; actors, who began in their street clothes, should be
increasingly costumed as they fall deeper into their roles. The
physical distance between audience and actors should be widened;
by scattering dirt or laying cloth, the bare stage should be made to
seem loamy, massy earth; lighting should be focused on the actors
alone, leaving everyone else in the dark. Though the actors might
not cease to sit with the audience, it should seem that they are
gradually becoming unrecognizable as people we know; they must
leave their first community center personas (whatever they were)
behind. This rift should be effected in small adjustments after
every dialect song, culminating with the final shift demarcated
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by Osofisan: “for a more dramatic effect, as discovered in the Ife
production, Sinsin and her friends sing the English version first”,
whereupon division should be essentially complete.
The play’s seminal moment is Esu’s turn toward the
audience in Hangover with an injunction for them to speak as
judges:
“OLD MAN I’m
going to throw the
question to the
audience and let
their fellow human
beings decide! (to
the audience) You!
Don’t just sit there
and let an injustice
be done. Say
something!... Speak
up, we need your
answers to decide!
Yes, you sir? And
you, madam!...
(A debate is now
encouraged among
members of the
audience, while the
actors freeze on
stage…)
OLD MAN …Well,
I’m sorry…but the
no side has won”
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The structures of both strategies crumble into one another; we
can’t quite figure out who is in charge and so the power-sharing
agreement is ambiguous. The actors remain in character, but are
estranged from the setting (“the actors freeze on stage”, but retain
their personas); the audience is drawn-in again, but is estranged
from the actors (the actors are acting as characters). The didactic
nature of the text is repudiated by the final debate about whether
or not to end of performance. There is no apotheosis to the
morality play, no balancing of the moral ledger between Redio—
who uses Esu’s power to do good, but takes upon himself the
curse of leprosy—and the vagabonds—who squander their wishes,
but end up rich. Redemption—in theater-space, cultural-space—
cannot be obtained, asserts the newly rebellious, Redio—obviously
healed by the breaking of the fourth wall, the smashing, each into
each, of both realities—with “a song and a dance…there’s just
no miraculous answer to life’s disasters. Even a play must face
the truth”—the truth that both the African mode (the totality
of a didactic/entertaining blend), and the Western arrangement
(the clear disjunction between high and low) are gone. There is,
finally, no solid universe—neither the fiction that exists as soon as
the audience sets foot in CFA, nor the community center entered
through the screen, nor the story entered via observation of the
stage, nor yet the final, ruptured oeuvre—for any member of
this society to hold onto because “the story you heard does not
exist…you’ve missed the difference between reality and its many
mirrors”. The audience is caught in a nebulous metaphorical
space, “in a fading tale”; the distance to the audience is African
and Western in character, bridged—the audience, as above, are
asked to take control of the play—and unbridgeable—the actors
finally finish the production as “the author wants it”. An authority
which is not the people has ultimate fief over what happens to
this world, but it, nevertheless, a world blatantly involves and
admits the audience in its final logic. With an injunction born of
the reconciliation of the twin-forms, Orunmila, Esu’s nemesis,
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liberates, as Osofissan thus liberates, the African-Western
conundrum from itself: “Roots,” they bid together, “resume your
growing”. Esu is thereby made a trope to fulfill his function; a
link between the two shores of the chasm, he acts as “a sort of
intermediary between destiny and fulfillment”.
The degree of spontaneity1 in the adaptation of this
scene would determine the final perception of distance between
the author, the actors, and the audience—the extent to which
the audience feels that it has answered the question of who
is authoring the play. That perception can be determined by
directorial clarification of three main ambiguities: Who is the
author—Osofisan or the members of the community center?
Who are the actors—our friends, members of the community
center, or the characters themselves? How spontaneous does the
final merger feel—who is being interrupted, and by whom? If
one of these questions were answered—if the role of one element
were made more forceful via spontaneity of speech (recitation,
improvisation, bombast), blocking (high/low levels, body language
dominant/submissive), or the addition or removal of layers to
or from actors and stage—the power relationship would shift to
the verified party. There are six potential “verified parties”: the
individuals performing might be felt to be 1) people we know
putting on a play, 2) actors playing community center members
who are themselves acting, 3) actors, members of the community
center, in character, who read Osofisan’s words (the interruption
would feel intended), 4) actors, members of the community center
in character, departing from Osofisan’s intent, hijacking the play
(the interruption would feel improvised), 5) actors, community
center members improvising an end to an unfinished play that
they wrote, 6) community center members, who, in acting, are
transformed totally into their characters (the interruption would
seem either spontaneous or improvised depending upon from
which author and in what way they depart). There is, in my
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mind, no definitive choice—this would have to be worked out in
rehearsal, and it should probably vary even from performance to
performance.
In a parallel to the way in which Osofisan reveals in Esu
an “agency of metamorphosis in the midst of disharmony” (Okur),
the mashed mechanism and assonant skin of everything which has
occurred since the fracture of Overture, should be illuminated at
play’s end: the house lights come up (should be almost too bright),
“the actors join the audience”. As the generative impulses of the
community are set free via reality’s clash with un-reality—itself
created by shifting tension between actors, characters, author and
audience—the actors and audience members should immediately
resume their daily lives: “The theater empties. Life resumes.” The
memory of the presentation should linger, like the taste of smoke,
in their mouths.
Endnotes
1 The following is my ideal rendering of this scene. When Esu recites the
line quoted above, he addresses himself to both the audience, and to the
curtain. He should be insistent in this. The Male Leper, when he says his
line “What else are we, but metaphors in a fading tale?,” should do the
same, whereupon the curtain should be haltingly raised to reveal that
the auditorium is filled with people, dressed head-to-toe in black (shoes,
pants, turtleneck, gloves, ski-masks), who have obviously occupied the
auditorium while the production was ongoing. The play should end, the
extras to file out with the audience members, and then disappear.
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Harbach Theater
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Brockett, Oscar G., and Franklin J. Hildy. History of the Theatre.
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Choma, Craig. Lecture. Scenic Design Presentations. Center for Fine Arts,
Knox College. 22 Nov. 2008.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove P, 2005.
Fo, Dario. Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Ed. Joseph Farrell. Trans.
Simon Nye. London: Methuen Drama, 2004.
Okur, Nilgun A. “Ritual, Tradition and Reconstruction in Contemporary
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