Very few hands escape the bloody taint of slavery in “Oroonoko.” Unsurprisingly, the English slave traders and overseers come in for abuse in Aphra Behn’s pioneering 1688 novel, which begins in West Africa and ends in the Caribbean colony of Surinam. But even these enslaved Africans, despite being presented by Behn as paragons of honor and nobility, had routinely sold their own prisoners of war to these same Englishmen.

The Nigerian playwright Biyi Bandele has revamped “Oroonoko” to an almost unrecognizable degree for the adventurous off-Broadway company, Theatre for a New Audience. In a swap from the usual disclaimer, everything but Behn’s names has been changed to protect the innocent. Or, rather, it is Mr. Bandele’s provocative claim that innocence, in the context of this peculiar institution, was and is a very, very rare commodity.

While many of these radically new passages can try the patience, replacing Behn’s turgid but effective melodrama with overextended flights of poetry and crotch jokes, Mr. Bandele and the director, Kate Whoriskey, have knocked their title character off his pedestal and into some newly complicated moral ground.

As before, the plot chronicles the meeting, sundering, reunion, and tragic final parting of two impossibly virtuous Africans — the young prince Oroonoko (Albert Jones, whose boyish features offset his commanding bearing) and his fiancée Imoinda (the striking Toi Perkins). After contending with a corrupt king who seizes Imoinda for himself, Oroonoko finds himself tricked into slavery and shipped to the sugarcane plantations of Surinam. There he rejoins Imoinda, whom he had believed to be dead, and the two lovers’ fates intertwine with a slave rebellion before ending with a tragic crime of passion.

Behn saved her lengthier, more potent observations and natural descriptions for the New World, and the hugely popular 1696 stage adaptation by Thomas Southerne followed suit. But the Middle Passage, the hellish sea voyage that brought slaves from West Africa to the New World, lives up to its name in Mr. Bandele’s conception: He has fleshed out the scenes in Africa, forestalling Oroonoko’s enslavement until the very end of Act I.

This brings a focus on some of Ms. Whoriskey’s more pleasing contributions, including the extensive use of percussionist Mar Gueye, who performs Juwon Ogungbe’s original score throughout “Oroonoko” and also leads the cast in a series of vibrant Yoruba chants. (Behn gave the location as Coramantien, which was in present-day Ghana; Mr. Bandele recognized the African characters’ names as Yoruba and has relocated the setting accordingly.) The extended African setting also provides a wider showcase for Emilio Sosa’s superb costumes and for John Douglas Thompson’s memorable turn as a conniving royal henchman.

But not all of this new material proves worth the added attention. Mr. Bandele charts Oroonoko’s moral development through a series of predictable signposts; his Oroonoko, unlike Behn’s somewhat stilted paragon but very much like Luke Skywalker or Simba the lion cub, starts out as a callow, boisterous youth who is mentored by a gnomic general who educates him through proverbs like “‘I entered but took nothing’ will not save the thief.”

Those last lessons were learned a bit too well: Mr. Bandele’s “Oroonoko” is stuffed to the gills with aphorisms and soaring descriptors. Life is a whip, life is a journey, rain is the beard of God bathed in rain, the king is a ripe coconut that falls on a child at night. The characters rattle these off in series of three and five and even seven, long after the respective points have been made.

Despite this perfumed language, Mr. Bandele pointedly refrains from sugarcoating the African sequences. Oroonoko beheads a would-be Turkish usurper in the play’s very first scene, and the subplot of Imoinda’s fate in the hands of the lecherous king, a source of titillating seraglio exotica in Behn’s hands, has become a ghastly scene of sexual degradation that includes a gang rape and a near-drowning. The ugliness of this sequence is all the more jarring as it comes after several long exchanges devoted almost entirely to leering double entendres about the king’s sexual prowess. The tone stabilizes a bit once our hero and his beloved are shipped off to the Caribbean, but Mr. Bandele has created an intriguing duality that stems from Oroonoko’s nobility. Suddenly the proud warrior, who had slaughtered an emissary for merely threatening his people with slavery, now sides with the colonists — the men who actually did capture him and his brethren — in quashing an Indian uprising. “If we are slaves,” he counsels his countryman, “these men did not make us slaves.”

Behn’s “Oroonoko” has (most likely apocryphally) been called “the first English novel.” But as the Caribbean setting makes these slaves every bit as “American” as Christopher Columbus, shouldn’t it be the first American novel? Emigration, assimilation, ambivalence over one’s heritage — is Oroonoko a noble savage or an American success story? A deified Other or a flattering mirror image? Long after the stirring Yoruba dances and chants fade, Mr. Bandele sees to it that these questions linger with a welcome sting.

Until March 9 (229 W. 42nd St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 646-223-3010).