Adrienne Kennedy, the acclaimed playwright whose He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box premiered at Theater for a New Audience in 2018, was the one who introduced artistic director Jeffrey Horowitz to Wole Soyinka’s The Swamp Dwellers.
At 93, celebrated American playwright Adrienne Kennedy remains unwavering in her admiration for Nobel laureate Prof. Wole Soyinka.
When asked to share thoughts on Soyinka’s The Swamp Dwellers, she responded not with a casual endorsement but with fervent verse, declaring him the “greatest living playwright” — a champion of human rights whose legacy, in her words, stands unmatched, according to the New York Times
Adrienne Kennedy, the acclaimed playwright whose He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box premiered at Theater for a New Audience in 2018, was the one who introduced artistic director Jeffrey Horowitz to Wole Soyinka’s The Swamp Dwellers.
Now 93, Kennedy has taught the play for years. When Horowitz asked her for a statement about it, she responded not with prose but with impassioned verse — praising Soyinka’s lifelong fight for the rights of people of colour.
It is high praise, and Soyinka, now 90, has never sought it. But it’s also richly earned. A Nobel laureate, poet, essayist, and dramatist, Soyinka has spent decades crafting fiercely intelligent, socially engaged work while risking everything for the causes he believes in — including freedom, justice, and the right to dissent.
“I’m a fundamentalist of human freedom,” Soyinka said recently in Brooklyn, seated backstage at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, where his 1958 play The Swamp Dwellers is receiving its Off-Broadway premiere, thanks in part to Kennedy’s advocacy. “It’s as elementary as that.”
The revival of The Swamp Dwellers, one of Soyinka’s earliest plays, arrives just months after he turned 90 — a milestone he approached not with fanfare but with quiet withdrawal. In the face of devastating global crises like the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, Soyinka said he nearly shut out the world.
“For six months I just did not read any newspapers,” he recalled. “Occasionally somebody would send me a link, but otherwise I just put my eyes away, even to avoid headlines.”
He described it as an “experiment” in detachment, a gift to himself. But even self-imposed distance could not dull his lifelong impulse to engage. “You never really enjoy it,” he admitted. “Sooner or later, it catches up with you.”
That Soyinka is being celebrated anew with The Swamp Dwellers is especially poignant for the playwright. Written when he was just 24, and living for the first time outside Nigeria — still under British colonial rule — the one-act drama is set on the edge of a swamp in the Niger Delta, where city and rural life collide, and dreams are literally and figuratively washed away.
“It was sort of the cusp of independence,” he said. “Let’s just say that my mind was very much on home — the politics, the realities, the climate, the food.”
He confessed he had “forgotten the existence” of the play, rarely staged in recent years, until Theater for a New Audience reached out. Revisiting it now, he sees the youthful optimism of a writer still brimming with belief in a united Nigeria.
“That play now makes me recollect very vividly that eve-of-independence season when we were all gung-ho about the emergence of a unified society,” he said.
Director Awoye Timpo, who helms this production, sees in The Swamp Dwellers the early signatures of Soyinka’s epic vision: “He can capture something so deeply personal and still make it feel mythic.”
Soyinka’s long career has spanned coups, civil war, and exile. He spent two years imprisoned during the Biafran War, and later fled Nigeria under threat of execution. Through it all, his art has remained intertwined with his politics — but not, he insists, because conflict is good for creativity.
“I’m a glutton for tranquillity,” he said, laughing. “Creating is a way of extracting something positive while resisting the destructive limpet gene that clings to human evolution.”
His views remain fierce, his clarity undimmed. He’s deeply unsettled by the rise of right-wing populism in the U.S., where he once lived and taught. He famously cut up his green card after Donald Trump’s 2016 victory and now refers to the country as “MAGA land.”
“It’s one of the saddest developing phenomena,” he said, “to watch what’s happening in such a potentially progressive country.”
Asked if he feels safe visiting the U.S. today, he offered a half-smile and a shrug: “Oh, I’ve lived in a constant state of nonsafety. So I’m used to that.”
But even as age and history temper his earlier idealism, Soyinka has not surrendered it entirely.
“I’ve lost that sense of achievable idealism,” he said. “But it’s always there. One never loses a projection of what you think your society can be. That’s what hurts.”
Still, from Adrienne Kennedy’s view, Soyinka’s body of work stands tall. It’s not just the audacity of his voice, but the enduring relevance of his vision — a restless search for truth, a refusal to look away. At 90, the playwright remains both witness and participant in a world he cannot help but challenge.