"The Elephant in the Room"
According to the International Affairs page of the Fish
and Wildlife Service’s website, “African elephants are being poached at
unprecedented levels to supply the illegal ivory trade, and the United States
is among the largest markets for illegal ivory. We’ve implemented this
near-total ban to ensure that U.S. domestic markets do not contribute to the
decline of elephants in the wild.” If you own anything made of ivory and
wish to sell it within the US borders, you must, of course, comply with very
strict regulations, particularly with regard to when you obtained it. |
| Ito Aghayere, Jojo Gonzalez, Kevin Mambo, Sahr Ngaujah. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
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| Sahr Ngaujan. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Although deeply researched, Mlima’s Tale is not a docudrama but a highly artistic exposé of a scandalous
wildlife dilemma (an elephant is killed every 15 minutes) that fills its never
faltering 80 minutes with fascinating information contained in dramatically
compelling scenes.
Nottage skillfully (but not slavishly) deploys an episodic format
roughly similar to Arthur Schnitzler’s La
Ronde, an episodic play in which one of the two characters in each scene
appears in the succeeding scene with someone new, creating a daisy chain
eventually tying the final scene to the first.
The poaching, selling, shipping, smuggling, carving, selling,
and display of elephant tusks is concentrated in the tale of a single African, 50-year-old
tusker known as Mlima, famous for his extraordinary tusks, and presumably under the
protection of the Kenyan wildlife authorities.
Nottage begins by introducing Mlima himself but not in any
recognizably elephantine way. Instead, we see—on a bare stage backed by a blue
sky and a large moon suggesting night on the savannah—a powerfully muscled
black man (Sahr Ngaujah). His head is shaved, his glistening body is dressed
only in the baggy trousers of an African villager, and he moves as sinuously as
a dancer.
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| Jojo Gonzalez, Ito Aghayere. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Mlima's trumpeting voice pours out his memories, the lessons he’s
learned from his elders, his ancestral past, his loves, his fears. Darron L. West’s
outstanding sound design and intriguing original music by Justin Hicks, who performs
it from a table below the stage at audience left, adds immeasurably to Ngaujah’s
indelible performance.
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| Ito Aghayere, Sahr Ngaujah, Kevin Mambo. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Then comes his horrible killing at the hands of a pair of
Somalian poachers (Jojo Gonzalez and Ito Aghayere); the negotiations between the older poacher and a ruthless ivory dealer (Kevin Mambo); a discussion between the
dealer and a demoralized game warden (Aghayere); and one between the warden and
the white Kenyan Director of Wildlife (Mambo). The characters range from unquestionably mercenary to morally conflicted; all, however, regardless of their individual human needs, are complicit.
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| Kevin Mambo, Sahr Ngaujah. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
These scenes are followed by others featuring, for example, a
Chinese diplomat (Gonzalez), a Tanzanian businessman (Aghayere), and an American
ship captain (Gonzalez). Meanwhile, the tusks make their way through Vietnam to the Beijing
apartment of a nouveau riche Chinese woman (Aghayere), who shows off to
guests the beautifully carved tusks she’s purchased for a fortune.
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| Ito Aghayere, Sahr Ngaujah, Kevin Mambo. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
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| Sahr Ngaujah, Jojo Gonzalez, Kevin Mambo. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Early on, Mlima’s spirit covers his body and face in stripes
of ivory paint. Then, standing by ominously, a look of grim judgment on his
face, he looms over every scene as, one by one, the characters reveal their participation, implicit or explicit, in the ivory trade. With unforgettable solemnity, he moves past
them, subtly touching them on the shoulder, hand, or sleeve, marking their collusion with the taint of ivory.
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| Sahr Ngaujah. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Jo Bonney has directed with exquisite skill on Riccardo Hernandez’s
simple set of sliding panels, gorgeously lit by Lap Chi Chu. Projections of what
appear to be folk sayings, some of them redolent with meaning, accompany the
scene changes, among them “No matter how full the river, it still wants to grow”
and “The teeth are smiling, but is the heart?”
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| Kevin Mambo, Ito Aghayere, Sahr Ngaujah, Jojo Gonzalez. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Ngaujah, gifted with physical and vocal beauty, makes the
pachyderm a hauntingly tragic presence; he need merely stand there, silently
watching, for you to feel how deeply he’s invested. Aghayere, Gonzalez, and
Mambo, his costars—with the expert aid of Jennifer Moeller’s terrific costumes—play
their multiple roles with exceptional versatility, altering their accents and attitudes
with spot-on accuracy. They provide just the right degree of
three-dimensionality to characters who could easily be cardboard stereotypes.
With Mlima’s Tale Nottage
once again demonstrates her commitment to socially important themes by engaging
them in dramatically urgent and theatrically expressive ways. Her talent is the
elephant in the room, a talent that grows with her every outing.
OTHER VIEWPOINTS:
Public Theater/Martinson Hall
425 Lafayette Ave., NYC
Through June 3