Color defines the world quite differently in Death and the King's Horseman, which is, for my money, the meatiest and most satisfying of the four shows that opened last weekend. It may represent the finest expression of Rauch's artistic vision for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival: challenging, substantial and rewarding work by a top playwright who sees our world as a global village just getting to know itself.
That playwright, Nigerian Wole Soyinka, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986. Death and the King's Horseman, written in 1975, is based on a real-life incident shortly after World War II in which a British colonial officer intervened to prevent the expected ritual suicide of a kings horseman, throwing the community into chaos.
This is not a simple story, and the color lines are not simplistically drawn. Derrick Lee Weeden is wonderfully sexy, charming and charismatic as Elesin, the king's horseman who is required by Yoruba custom to follow his dead king to the grave 30 days after the king's death. But once Elesin is given permission by Iyaloja (Perri Gaffney), the head of the marketplace women, to marry the girl of his choice, he begins to waver in his resolve, which is then crushed by his arrest by the bureaucratic British district officer, Simon Pilkings, played by Rex Young.
Ryan Anderson is likewise spot on as Olunde, the not quite fully Westernized son of Elesin who travels back from his medical studies in London to attend his father's expected funeral.
Directed by Chuck Smith, the play is dense but engaging. Its language is at times quite Shakespearean and difficult at first to grasp. The plot presents a kind of inverted classical tragedy, one in which death is reasonably sought and tragically denied.
This is no war between African and European custom so much as it is an exploration of magic, reason and the role of sacrifice and redemption in our lives. Pilkings is not an evil force here so much as an unwarty one; his arrest of the horseman is purely to prevent what he sees as a foolish death.
The story's powerful denouement shows that Christianity is not the sole exponent of selfless sacrifice.