Hertz 1

Caroline Hertz

Mfoniso Udofia

Global Drama in Context

10 October 2017

A Letter of Opposition from the Desk of Caroline Hertz to Diane Paulus, the Artistic Director of

the American Repertory Theater

Dear Diane Paulus,

I hope this note finds you in good health. My name is Caroline Hertz; you may remember

me. I am an actor, currently studying at the New School for Drama. I have a background in text

analysis and dramaturgy, and have worked as a dramaturg and theater critic. Most notably, as it

pertains to you, I worked in the Development and Marketing Offices at the A.R.T. from August

2016 to August 2017. I’m writing to you today with regard to your upcoming production of

Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard. Before I delve into the heart of what I’d like to say, I

must first embark on a quick contextualizing detour involving the original novel and its initial

critical reception. I beg your indulgence in this, and I ask you to humor me; I do not take this

detour because I assume you have not done your research—only because it will ultimately be

relevant to the primary subject of this letter.

The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a first-person account of the journey of the Father of the

Gods Who Could Do Anything in This World who, at the beginning of the story, has devoted his

entire life to guzzling enormous quantities of palm wine throughout all hours of the day and
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night. But when his palm-wine tapster suddenly dies, our hero finds himself bereft of palm wine

- and once his palm wine supply has dried up, all of his friends abandon him. Determined to

reclaim his carefree way of life, the Father of the Gods (our narrator) embarks on a quest to bring

his palm-wine tapster back from Deads’ Town. This quest encompasses many years and one

hundred pages, tracking the narrator through his marriage, the birth of his monstrous son, and his

encounters with various terrifying and wonderful creatures. Among these creatures is a gang of

Skulls, one of whom disguises himself as a Complete Gentleman by renting body parts from

others, an eternally hungry creature, a flock of good-hearted Wraiths, and a town full of

prehistoric red-colored people. When the Father of the Gods reaches Deads’ Town, his palm-

wine tapster tells him that it is impossible for him enter back into the narrator’s service, as the

dead cannot exist among the living. Instead, the tapster gifts our narrator with a magical wish-

granting egg, which our narrator uses to conjure palm-wine for himself and his community.

Through the combined forces of the magic egg and human sacrifice, our narrator ends famine in

his homeland.

When the book was originally published, it received mixed and vexingly inadequate

reviews. By Nigerians, particularly educated Nigerians, the book was critically scorned and

dismissed. Nigerian intellectuals perceived that the popularity of The Palm-Wine Drinkard

tarnished Nigeria’s reputation as an advanced nation by Western standards. They were furious

that a book being discussed as “primitive” in Western circles, and written in broken English, was

being made representative of Nigeria as a whole. On top of this, many African critics were

outraged at Tutuola’s adaptation of Yoruba folktales, claiming that they were Westernized

beyond recognition or just plain botched (Tobias 66).

The novel fared slightly better among Western critics, but only slightly. While Western

critics largely embraced the work, they did so in a way that undercut the value of the novel and

betrayed the West’s fundamental misunderstanding of Tutuola’s mission. For example, C.O.D.

Ekwensi spends the majority of his review lampooning The Palm-Wine Drinkard for what he

perceives as gross non-specificity and general lack of artistry, and deriding Tutuola for his

“atrocious disregard for the rules of simple grammar” (Ekwensi 257-258). “Why, for instance,”

ejaculates Ekwensi in exasperation, “must our drinkard always escape from his gruesomely tight

corners, not by his ingenuity or inventiveness, but by sheer convenience? As when, attempting to

rescue the girl who is later to become his wife, the solitary human skull guarding her should fall

asleep?” (Ekwensi 258). After the lion’s share of the review passes in this way, Ekwensi

bafflingly concedes that, despite its grievous shortcomings, the book is nevertheless a “valuable

contribution to West African literature...as an anthropological study” (Ekwensi 258). One

shudders to think what Mr. Ekwensi’s opinion of West African literature must be, if a work as

supposedly oafish as The Palm Wine Drinkard can constitute a worthy contribution to the field.

Other Western scholars share Ekwensi’s condescension, cloaking it in similar half-hearted

praise. Charles H. Curl praises The Palm-Wine Drinkard’s “simple narrative” and describes it as

“a fantasy” unburdened by anything “great or profound” (Curl 95). Curiously, Curl also

concludes his review by indulgently conceding that The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a “worthy

contribution to the preservation of African folklore” (Curl 95). Cid Corman writes in a review

that, bewilderingly, purports to be positive of Tutuola’s “crude, untutored English”—not to be

confused with his “incomplete and syntactically crude understanding of the English language”,

which is mentioned separately—and the interplay between “European culture” and “native

superstition” (Corman 85). All of these Western reviewers cut Tutuola’s work off at the knees,
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even as they claim to be holding his work up to be praised. Even as they recommend the work to

their readers, they belittle the culture and the man that created the work by using words like

“crude” and “simple” and by setting European “culture” off from native “superstition”. To this

day, The Palm-Wine Drinkard—which was, by all accounts, a literary phenomenon at the time of

its publishing—has yet to enjoy the critical reception that it deserves. This is not to say that it

deserves a positive or negative reception—only an honest, hard-hitting, open-minded reception

that has some semblance of integrity.

This brings us to you, Ms. Paulus. As a previous employee of the American Repertory

Theater, I tend to keep my ear to the ground when there are murmurs of new work going up on

the Loeb mainstage. I am told that you intend to stage Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard

as a 50-minute children’s play, in order to fill the Family Play slot for the 2018/2019 season.

Under your direction, I understand that this play will be performed in the mornings, on the set of

the mainstage play occurring in the evening, and that it will be targeted towards children aged 5 -

8. I am writing to beg you to reconsider.

My first objection to your current plan for Tutuola’s novel is this: when you relegate this

work to “children's’ material”, you reinforce the colonialist narrative surrounding the work that

goes all the way back to Ekwensi, Curl, and those of their ilk. I will be the first to admit that

children's’ plays, when they don’t talk down to their bright young audiences, can grapple with a

wide range of hairy topics, such as sex (for example, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, adapted

for the stage by Lydia Diamond) and death (The Yellow Boat by David Saar). But there remains

something inherently fishy about taking this novel—which was written for an adult audience—

and, in adapting it for the stage, arguing that its truest form is a children’s form. I would ask you

to examine your reasons for doing so, particularly when a full-length mainstage adaptation of the
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novel opens so many opportunities for innovation with regard to costume, lighting design, and

the theatrical form itself. The slogan of the A.R.T. is “Expanding the boundaries of theater”, is it

not? I’m at a loss, then, as to why you would turn down such an opportunity to expand the

boundaries of theater by banishing this work to a slot in your season that is under-produced,

under-funded, scarcely designed, and poorly attended. Perhaps you have read The Palm-Wine

Drinkard and, like Corman, think its language so primitive, its narrative structure so simple, that

the work could only be meant for consumption by children. If this is the case, I would challenge

you to reconsider your impression of Tutuola’s novel. Steven Tobias, in his article, “Amos

Tutuola and the Colonial Carnival”, observes that, “Despite the fact that most of the incidents of

The Palm-Wine Drinkard appear to constitute little more than silly farce, many of them are in

fact covert jibes at colonialism and the social conditions that it engendered” (Tobias 67). Tobias

mentions one particular episode in which the narrator must turn himself into a canoe in order to

make money, and interprets it as “an autobiographical confession of the real grief Tutuola felt at

becoming a virtual object in service of an alien bureaucracy” (Tobias 67). Tobias argues that this

scene demonstrates how externally imposed economic systems—such as those brought on by

colonialism—force even deities to “struggle subhumanly...for a modest sum of British money”

(Tobias 67). I think Mr. Tobias’s take is extremely perceptive, and I would extend it beyond the

content of the novel to the form itself. The term “broken English” is perhaps useful here, for I

would argue that when Tutuola departs from common English syntactical structures, it is not

meant to be a reflection on the ignorance of the narrator, but rather the failure of English to

encapsulate certain kinds of ideas. When confronted with the hugeness of Yoruba lore, English

breaks—leaving broken English on the page, through which readers must navigate. My point is

this: though it may be tempting to interpret The Palm-Wine Drinkard as simple, unsophisticated
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material best suited for children, a more thorough examination of the material reveals a highly

charged and highly complex anti-colonialist narrative that begs to be staged and staged fully.

My second objection has to do with the scope of your pending adaptation of The Palm-

Wine Drinkard. In “Adapting a Novel to the Stage”, John Perry notes that “Playwriting demands

an economy of expression. Like poetry, it forces one to compress ideas…[L]iterary devices such

as stream-of-consciousness, imagery, symbolism, or even basic description to identify characters

and create atmosphere are of no avail to [the playwright]. The playwright’s tools are limited to

dialogue and movement” (Perry 1313). Perry goes on to explain that this principle can be applied

to determine what kinds of novels could be easily adapted to the stage, and what kinds of novels

might prove monstrously difficult to adapt to the stage. For example, he says, “It would be

foolish to adapt Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind for stage presentation. Its form is too

intricately spun; there are numerous characters, locales, and sub-plots. In telescoping the story

line and confining most of the action to interiors, the novel would lose its breadth—its

magnitude” (Perry 1314). There are those who argue that The Palm-Wine Drinkard is itself

already a piece of theater. While I truly appreciate the progressiveness of this perspective, I

cannot agree. This is in part due to Tutuola’s departure from Perry’s principle of “economy of

expression” and in part due to a tendency of Tutuola’s language to favor the expository and the

passive over the present and the active. For example, in the narrator’s very first adventure, he

recounts, “When I entered the house I saluted both of them, they answered me well, although

nobody should enter his house like that as he was a god, but I myself was a god and juju-man”

(Tutuola 194). The structure of this sentence is such that its substance lies in the expository

information and not on the action—and this kind of syntax proliferates in The Palm-Wine

Drinkard. This is not to say that Tutuola does not relate a highly theatrical story in The Palm-
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Wine Drinkard—only that the work itself is not yet theater. It is also not to say that The Palm-

Wine Drinkard will not make an excellent piece of theater, because I believe it can—but when a

novel relies so heavily, as The Palm-Wine Drinkard does, on literary structures like imagery,

stream-of-consciousness, punctuation, and capitalization to tell the story in its fullness, it

requires adaptation to translate to the stage. And the nature of that adaptation will have an

enormous impact on the ultimate integrity of the resultant piece of theater. To put it bluntly, I

take issue with the nature of your proposed adaptation of The Palm-Wine Drinkard. I take issue

with its miniscule scope. Condensing this work—this work that is often compared to “the

Odyssey”—down to fifty minutes, sacrifices the epic, confounding vastness that comprises the

very heart of The Palm-Wine Drinkard. Moreover, when considering which sections must fall by

the wayside in the formulation of a fifty-minute children’s theater adaptation of The Palm-Wine

Drinkard, I understand that your creative team will be eliminating all material that might frighten

a five-year-old. While I certainly sympathize with your reluctance to traumatize a theater full of

toddlers, I must once more voice my strong objections. First, the entire universe of The Palm-

Wine Drinkard is nightmarish—terrors lurk behind the turning of each new page, whether they

take the form of ghoulish living skulls who keep humans as pets, creatures who cruelly shave the

narrator’s head with broken bottle pieces, or Death personified. To surgically remove the horrors

from this novel would leave the story in unrecognizable tatters. Furthermore, there is the

undeniable fact that much of the novel’s most trenchant commentary is wrapped into ghastly

events. Take, for example, the episode involving the Skull who disguises himself as a Complete

Gentleman. The narrator reports that the Complete Gentleman is so beautiful to behold that he

weeps with envy, wondering “why was I not created with beauty as this gentleman” (Tutuola

207). However, when the Complete Gentleman retreats from the market place and makes his way
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back towards the cave he calls home, where he has imprisoned a young woman, he begins to

discard his body parts one by one, returning them to the people from whom he rented them, until

he is revealed in his true form – a cruel and terrible Skull. Steven Tobias posits that Tutuola is

here issuing a warning against the empty promises of would-be colonizers. “Tutuola suggests

that although Western ideas…might first seem tempting and attractive, these things ultimately

prove little more than a deceptive façade. Once stripped away they reveal the true underlying

structures of colonialism: death and enslavement” (Tobias 72). How wonderful it would be to

make this allegory explicit through a highly theatrical adaptation—but this is what you will

sacrifice if you sanitize Tutuola’s story free of horrors. Unconsciously or not, you will be pulling

out its anti-colonialist teeth, leaving an all-gums mockery of the original version.

If you intend to produce The Palm-Wine Drinkard—and I think you should—you must

find a new way of telling through theater. You must examine the conventions of Western theater

and find a way to both explore and subvert them in a way that is analogous to how Tutuola’s

novel both explores and subverts Western literary convention. You and your creative team must

immerse yourselves in Yoruba culture and Yoruba folklore, so as to maximize your

understanding of allusions, metaphors, and cultural resonances within the novel. You must also

seek to educate your audiences in the same way—perhaps by integrating this education into the

fabric of the play itself, or perhaps through another method that is external to the play, such as a

Lobby Experience. You have the opportunity to persuade a whole theater full of Westerners that

they must reckon with their colonialist roots—a self-reckoning that is desperately needed by a

people who struggle to empathize with the plight of any African nation, and justify their

callousness with the comforting false belief that brown-skinned people are simply warlike in

nature, and any collective wounds that they suffer are probably self-inflicted. You have the
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opportunity to make amends for the reprehensible way which the Western cultural elite treated

Tutuola’s work back in 1952. You have an amazing gift to give to your audiences. I envy you.

Go forth and make theater.

Works Cited

Corman, Cid. “The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola.” Books Abroad, vol. 28, no. 1, 1954,

p. 85.

Curl, Charles H. “Worthy Contribution to African Folklore.” Phylon, vol. 15, no. 1, 1954, pp.

94–95.

Ekwensi, C. O. D. “The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola.” African Affairs, vol. 51, no.

204, July 1952, pp. 257–258.

Perry, John. “Adapting a Novel to the Stage.” The English Journal, vol. 57, no. 9, Dec. 1968, pp.

1312–1315.

Tobias, Steven M. “Amos Tutuola and the Colonial Carnival.” Research in African Literatures,

vol. 30, no. 2, 1999.

Tutuola, Amos. The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Grove Press, 2004.