Lynn Nottage’s riveting new play, “Mlima’s Tale,” opens on a moonlit savanna. Deep elephant calls rumble through the theatre. At center stage, an African man (Sahr Ngaujah) begins a soliloquy. “I was taught by my grandmother to listen to the night,” he says. “Really listen . . . for the rains in the distance . . . listen to the rustling of the brush . . . for the cries of friend or foe . . . . Because how you listen can mean the difference between life and death. It’s the truth of the savanna, something we all learn at a very young age.”
The narrator, who is identified as “Mlima” (“mountain” in Swahili), soon reveals himself to be an elephant. He has been shot with a poison arrow and is being closely pursued by poachers intent on harvesting his enormous tusks. The tusks, 2.4 metres long and ninety kilos each, are worth a fortune. The poachers have been pursuing him for forty days and are closing in on their weakening quarry. Mlima’s nostalgic soliloquy is a lament for his life, which he feels ebbing away. “They are watching me always,” he says. “I hear them all around me. And I run more than I walk.”
Nottage is known as the author of plays which—as Hilton Als has written—combine a fable-like quality with deep naturalism. Michael Schulman described her plays as “unapologetic about their social concerns.” She is a prodigious researcher. For her 2012 Pulitzer Prize winning play, “Ruined,” set in the Congolese civil war, Nottage travelled to Central Africa three times in order to interview refugees from the savage regional conflicts. “Mlima’s Tale,” which is at the Public Theatre, is about ivory poaching and about the massacre of elephants in Africa. Andrew Graves (Kevin Mambo), who plays a “White Director of Wildlife,” lapses into an expository voice long enough to explain that poaching has reduced Africa’s elephant population by two-thirds in less than fifty years. “The maths are simple,” he puts it. “There are more elephants being killed than are being born, which means that in less than twenty years, they may well be extinct.”
Nottage told me that she’d loved elephants from the time she was a child and that her love had only been enhanced by encountering them firsthand in Africa. “They are beautiful, mystical creatures, which remind us of ourselves,” she told me. “They are social creatures, which form lasting relationships and are exceptionally protective of their offspring.” They also, she added, “have beautiful burial rituals, and are among the few creatures that return to mourn their dead.”
In 2013, when the massacre of elephants was near a peak, Nottage met with the film director Kathryn Bigelow and discussed Nottage’s doing a stage piece about elephants. “She was so disturbed by the situation of elephants,” Nottage said, “that her body was literally shaking.” Nottage spoke with Bigelow about doing a play that could “create empathy.” Initially, Nottage was thinking about a story about forest elephants set in Central Africa, but, in May of 2014, she heard about the death of Satao, a fifty-year-old male with famously large tusks who was killed by a poacher using a poison arrow, in Tsavo National Park, in Kenya (poachers inside parks often use arrows instead of rifles in order not to alert rangers). “That’s the story I wanted to tell,” she told me. Satao was a “giant tusker,” one of only about twenty-five remaining elephants—most in Kenya—genetically disposed to grow tusks so big that in some cases, they reach the ground. Nottage’s creation, Mlima, has the enormous tusks of the real-life Satao, but, rather than focus just on Mlima’s murder, Nottage made the ambitious decision to trace the stolen tusks, each step of the way along the chain of illegal underground transactions, to their ultimate destination in Beijing.
This story was challenging, and to tell it Nottage used a dramatic structure derived from a late-nineteenth-century play—“La Ronde,” by Arthur Schnitzler, which traces the sexual interactions between ten overlapping pairs of characters. In each scene, one of the characters from the previous scene carries over. In Nottage’s case, the paired interactions are the hands through which Mlima’s tusks pass. “In each scene, there’s one person in control and one person struggling to gain control,” she told me. “And at some point each has the option of not participating but ultimately chooses to participate—for greed.” When Mlima ultimately winds up in the Beijing high-rise, it’s because his owners—nouveau-riche entrepreneurs who buy Mlima’s tusks to ornament a new penthouse—are the ones who really control the way that ivory, as well as the world more generally, practices consumption. “Ivory,” she said, “is a metaphor for exploitation.”
Nottage wanted “Mlima’s Tale” to have the momentum of a thriller—particularly effective is a scene showing the nervous negotiation between Fu Guoxi (Jojo Gonzalez), an “information and public-affairs” specialist in the Chinese Embassy in Kenya, and Hassan Abdulla (Ito Aghayere), a sharply dressed Tanzanian businessman, that leads to Fu Guoxi’s purchase of Mlima’s tusks. Fu Guoxi recalls a beautiful seventeenth-century ivory carving of the Buddhist goddess of compassion, Guanyin, that his father, in China, had hidden away during the revolution, but was later destroyed. Suspecting that Hassan Abdulla is in possession of Mlima’s tusks, he says suggestively that “I have always wanted to find something to replace Guanyin.” As the conversation proceeds, the ghost of Mlima performs an invisible Buddhist dance to Guanyin in the background.
Nottage says that she discovered, in the course of rehearsal, that “Mlima’s Tale” was really a ghost story. “How else could we understand a play in which the central character dies in the first four minutes?” she said. A key scene takes place just after Mlima is killed. One of the poachers, who is Somalian, asks if it’s true what the Maasai say, that if you don’t give an elephant a proper burial, the elephant will haunt you forever. The other poacher, busy hacking off Mlima’s tusks, dismisses this belief as “infidel” nonsense, but Nottage told me that the poachers’ refusal to honor the dead Mlima was key for the subsequent dynamics of the play. “That’s why the regional warden Wamara, who is concerned with solving the crime of Mlima’s death, is so concerned that Mlima’s tusks not leave the park.”
After his murder, Mlima is symbolically transformed into his own tusks. He streaks his body with dust and white paint and becomes a silent presence haunting each of the ensuing scenes, leaving white dust on each person he encounters. The play describes this as a mark of complicity. “You’ll notice,” Nottage told me, “that the gesture always happens just before or just after the character decides to participate in the ivory exchange.”
“Mlima’s Tale” contains one powerful scene that both breaks the logic of “La Ronde” and also gives the play larger resonance. Mlima’s tusks have been sold and concealed in a shipping container under a cargo of timber. The contraband container is sold to a broker in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa and secretly transported to a freighter bound for Vietnam. Once the transfer is made and the ship safely departs coastal waters, Mlima awakens to the rhythm of the ocean, under which he makes out the faint, fragmentary incantations of “elephant memories.”
Kade, son of Gatimu,
Kabonessa, daughter of Kiserian,
Lakenua, mother of Namelok,
Naiponoi, son of Nataana,
Njeri, mother of Waragugu.
Mlima presses against the confines of his container and responds: “I’m Mlima of the Great Plains. Eldest of my clan. I was tracked for many days, taken by a poison arrow. Why are there so many of you?! Mumbi? Koko? Do you hear me?”
After listening to more elephant voices, Mlima can only manage, “Mlima, father of Gitu.”
“He fights to get out,” the stage directions say. “It is a fight that he loses.”
The names and the voices of the elephant memories are from all over Africa, Nottage told me. “From Zimbabwe, from Zambia, Sudan, Tanzania, and the Congo—places where elephants are found.” The names, she said, are Kikuyu, Swahili, and many other African languages. The scene is intended, Nottage explained, to have the resonance of the Middle Passage, the stage of the slave trade in which millions of Africans were shipped to the New World. “It’s not just about the exploitation of African ivory,” she told me. “It’s also minerals, animals, and even people. That exploitation continues.”