"Staging Our Native Nation"

Article 5 & 6

[I’m posting Articles 5 and 6 together here, and I think you’ll find they inform one another somewhat.  Of course, I feel that all eight of the AT articles in “Staging Out Native Nation” inform one another, so as always, I encourage Rick On Theater readers to go back and read Articles 1 through 4 (if you haven’t been keeping up with the collection) since they each tell a different story of theater by America’s indigenous peoples.  The series on ROT started on 24 March and each succeeding post followed at a three-day interval.  ~Rick]

WE START BY ACKNOWLEDGING THE LAND

by Rob Weinert-Kendt

[“Every day we walk obliviously over the bones of our land’s Native forebears,” feels AT editor Rob Weinert-Kendt,  “like imperial Romans over Etruscan ruins, driving Jeep Cherokees to Chipotle for a bowl of quinoa.”  Whether we live out west, in New England, or among the urban cliffs of New York City, America’s native heritage is all around us and right under our feet.  (I live on an island called Manhattan, a Native American name, as observed in Mary Kathryn Nagle’s play Manahatta.)  The emerging American theater of the country’s indigenous people, the original inhabitants, is giving that heritage a voice and an artistic presence on stages all over the country now.  It’s been what this series has been all about, of course, but it’s also an important development in the theater of our nation, native and immigrant.]

Our nation’s Native history is all around us, if we would only pay attention. One place to look: at a rising generation of Native theatremakers.

Like most Americans, I grew up in a graveyard where the names of the dead could hardly be said to have been left unrecorded: More than half of U.S. states have Native American-derived names, and in my home state of Arizona (from a Pima/Papago word for “small spring”), my grade schools bore the names Hopi (an extant Arizona tribe) and Hohokam (an ancient Native culture of the Southwest). I now work on the island of Manhattan, a name derived from the Lenape language, and on summer weekends I and my family frequently head for the beaches at Rockaway, named for a Long Island tribe.

But these place names are at best phantoms, palimpsests; the indigenous cultures they signify have been largely obliterated, along with the vast majority of the continent’s original population. Every day we walk obliviously over the bones of our land’s Native forebears, like imperial Romans over Etruscan ruins, driving Jeep Cherokees to Chipotle for a bowl of quinoa.

Perhaps more bluntly indicative of the long-tail legacy of European-American genocide and erasure is the name of an arterial thoroughfare that runs near my childhood home in Phoenix: Indian School Road. Its namesake was a notorious fixture of downtown Phoenix, a military-style boarding school, in operation from 1891 to 1990, in which young students culled from several Arizona tribes were ostensibly educated in trades and vocations but in reality were stripped of their distinctive cultures and languages and exploited as cheap labor as they were frog-marched into a spurious “assimilation.” Not coincidentally, in the mid-20th century, the U.S. government’s Indian Relocation Act “encouraged” Native Americans to move to urban areas and train for jobs in the mainstream economy. The net effect: More than two-thirds of Native Americans now live in urban areas rather than on reservations.

The boarding schools have mostly closed, replaced by a network of tribal colleges and universities with a more Native-centric ethic. The combination of an increasingly urban demographic and a resurgent Native consciousness means that a new generation of educated, essentially bicultural Native Americans has emerged within and alongside mainstream culture, with a new relationship to their embattled heritage and justifiably raised expectations about their place in the larger U.S. culture and body politic. Today Native Americans are leading activists and politicians, authors and athletes—and, as a number of stories in this issue demonstrate and celebrate, makers of theatre, where a cohort of playwrights, directors, performers, and producers are reclaiming the narratives of the past, reflecting their complicated present, and redefining their future.

In so doing they are also reminding us of the heritage we all share on this stolen continent. Artists like Larissa FastHorse, DeLanna Studi, and Mary Kathryn Nagle—building on the pathbreaking work of such veteran Native artists like William Yellow Robe and Muriel Miguel—are giving bodies and voices to the vestigial markers many of us drive by without a second thought. FastHorse, who encourages all theatres to do a “land acknowledgment” before every performance and meeting (and not only of Native-themed events), will soon bring this reclamation project close to home, or to my hometown, anyway: She’s teaming with the University of Arizona to adapt her 2016 Cornerstone play Urban Rez, about Southern California’s urbanized Native population, to Arizona’s 22 tribes, for a spring 2019 debut. Cornerstone will then take the show on the road, courtesy of a New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) touring grant, adapting it to indigenous communities around the country, and earning the play its new title, Native Nation. Land acknowledgment, indeed.

[Rob Weinert-Kendt is also the author of “Raising Native Voices, Then Amplifying Them,” Article 4 in this series, posted on 2 April.]

*  *  *  *

A MEETING OF TWO WORLDS IN NEW MEXICO

by Frances Madeson

[Kim Delfina Gleason, artistic director of Albuquerque’s Two Worlds, a Native American theater and film company, was pregnant when Frances Madeson met her to write “A Meeting of Two Worlds in New Mexico,” below, and both Gleason and Madeson would say it was a “pregnant moment” for America’s native theater all across the country.  “Meeting” is a brief profile of Two Worlds and serves as something of a paradigm for the emergence of native theater at this moment in American theater history.]

A fledgling theatre company in the Land of Enchantment tells Native American stories with both authenticity and imagination.

Pregnant with hope, pregnant with possibility, and just plain pregnant, on Jan. 25, the very night before Two Worlds artistic director Kim Delfina Gleason was due to give birth to her first child, she hosted a monthly table reading at the 12-year-old Native American theatre company’s offices at New Mexico Community Capital in Albuquerque.

While the baby rumbled his soliloquy of intention to join his parents and the vibrant ensemble of Native theatre artists and community members his mom has so devotedly served since 2009, Gleason photocopied scripts, made a fresh pot of coffee, and taped a sign on the street door directing newcomers to the conference room—her swollen belly floating before her, balloon-like, as she moved through her paces.

As participants filed in, some of them seeming almost magically well suited for the multi-generational roles in Zee Eskeets’s drama Fadeaway being read that remarkable evening, Gleason greeted everyone warmly, handing out scripts and gently assigning parts. Some of the readers were complete tyros, curious strangers who’d seen an event notice on social media or who’d been encouraged to attend by a therapist at rehab, while others, like playwright Jay B. Muskett, whose play The Weight of Shadows will be produced by Two Worlds in June, were already part of the Two Worlds family.

“The community kept asking me what’s next, what’s the next show, pushing me to not give up,” Gleason said about her commitment to Two Worlds over the years. “People are asking a lot more, ‘Tell me what happened at Wounded Knee—let’s hear the stories.’ They need Native theatre to exist; really, it depends on me.”

Two Worlds was founded in 2006 by James Lujan, currently the Chair of Cinematic Arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, to professionalize the pool of Native actors available for hire in New Mexico’s bustling film industry. But when Gleason assumed the helm at Lujan’s request three years later, she realized there was no purchase in continuing to play savages and princesses, no matter how skillfully.

“I was done playing the poor little Indian girl who can put a feather in her long hair,” Gleason said about her own acting career. “Terry Gomez of the Comanche nation was writing powerful monologues for Native women, big characters. That’s what I wanted—I wanted to see more of that, and more contemporary stories in everyday settings. We’re real people, and not all of us have the same situations. We want to tell our own stories authentically and we don’t want the white society to tell our stories.”

Eskeets, a graduate of University of New Mexico’s MFA Program in Playwriting, wrote Fadeaway while working toward completion of her degree. Her third full-length play, it’s an imaginative rendering of the real life events surrounding Navajo high schooler Brooke Spencer, a basketball player whose layup won her team in Gallup, N.M.—the Lady Bengals—the state championship in 2006. The college-bound athlete was slain by her on-again, off-again boyfriend, just days after her family’s high school graduation party celebrating her achievements. The grotesque murder stunned the Navajo nation and hit Eskeets particularly hard: the 18-year-old Spencer was her cousin.

“I couldn’t go to her graduation party because I had to work,” Eskeets recalled. “Three days later on the front porch steps of my grandma’s house . . . [.]” She trailed off at the mention of the setting where Spencer was knifed by the boy, who is set to be released from federal prison next year.

Eskeet struggled with the first iteration of Fadeaway, as she tried to write it from the Brooke character’s vantage point. Ultimately she scrapped the 100-page script because she didn’t want the play to seem “victim-y”—and rewrote it from the murderer’s perspective.

“I hate that guy—I hate him with a passion,” she explained. “But writing the character I started to like him; I don’t know if empathize is the right word. I felt so bad for this guy who has nothing going for him except this girl. He’s in his prison. He loves this person so much, he’s never going to be able to say he’s sorry. I was crying as I wrote the murder scene at 5 o clock in the morning.”

The play received a university production in 2013 and “got standing ovations every night, people coming up to me in tears,” Eskeets recalled. She said Spencer’s mom told her: “That’s exactly how he was; I didn’t think anything like that would happen.”

Eskeets has hopes the show can be produced in Gallup, with Gleason directing. It’s not a far-fetched idea: As Two Worlds board member Lee Francis explained, touring productions to reservations, border towns like Gallup, and pueblo lands in New Mexico to engage Native audiences is very much a part of the company’s vision under Gleason’s leadership. Francis, who is the CEO/publisher of Native Realities Press, which produces indigenous comic books, is focusing his board participation on networking relationships to create an abundance of audience support in New Mexico’s most populous city.

“This is not Orlando, it’s Albuquerque, which should be the hub for this kind of work,” he said. “This is where we should be represented. Natives comprise 10 percent of the state’s population, and that level of support would be a game changer.”

Francis celebrates the current resurgence of interest in the work of Native theatre artists, but as a watchful observer of American pop culture, he said he’s seen these cycles come and go—one in the 1970s, another in the ’90s.

“It’s still at a fragile place,” he said about the current moment. “The press tends to gravitate around the same names, but excellent Native actors and playwrights are popping up all over the place.”

Places like Mexican Springs, N.M., a Navajo community north of Gallup, population 1200, that playwright Jay Muskett calls home—a place he’s fled and returned to, a muse of a place that stirs his imagination like no other he’s found so far. Since 2013 Muskett has lived on his reservation in a hogan, writing every day, composing dozens of plays.

“Playwriting has saved my life,” he said. “It filled the hole I had always felt. It connected me back to my own culture. It helped me put two and two together. I finally understood why ceremony and performance are still important, especially being Native American.”

Like Eskeets, Muskett acknowledges the trauma of his people and lives with a sense of responsibility to tell their stories.

“There’s a lot of trauma on the rez, and people don’t really have the outlet to get things off their chest,” he explained. “In my writing, I don’t steer away from the bad things that happen to people.”

As Gleason put it, “We don’t have to pretend.”

For all its willingness to face uncomfortable truths, Two Worlds also loves to present fantastical works featuring zombies and other chimerical beings. In response to a recent call for 10-minute plays centered on the theme of Blue Corn, one submission was a sci-fi script, a delightful surprise.

“Plays were submitted by writers with six years of professional experience to no experience,” Gleason said. “We’re gearing up to bring on the new generation.”

In August Two Worlds will present a staged reading festival of three full-length plays, to be directed by film directors who want the chance to direct for the theatre. “They can find it to be a little intimidating—there are no second takes,” said Gleason, clearly relishing the differences between the two worlds of theatre and film.

She’s also hoping to stage a Native/Hispanic Romeo and Juliet and is keen to find ways to work with the increasing number of Native playwrights who are now approaching Two Worlds to stage their work. A black box features prominently on her near-term wish list, but her ultimate dream is a fully professional Equity theatre. Toward that aim, she’s been building her business skills and seeking resources to move forward, including attracting a strong, skilled board who wants nothing more than to help take her where she wants to go.

Lee Francis sees a bright future for Two Worlds under Gleason’s leadership.

“Our audiences aren’t coming because it’s an an exotic version of Native life; our shows are neither niche, nor novelties,” he said. “They’re coming because it’s good theatre, because they’ll experience solid performances, and engage in theatre that is not predicated on Western ideals for engagement.”

Like so much in Native country, progress is a marathon, not a sprint.

“I push little by little, year by year; we’ve been planting the seeds and people have been helping us grow more,” said Gleason, her hands resting lightly on her middle. “It takes so much energy, so much passion and dedication to see yourself fail and fail and fail. It’s only pushed me harder to make us exist. When doors keep shutting on us, I tell myself there’s going to be that one door that will open.

“It’s been so hard at times, there have been moments when I wanted to walk away. But then I’ll come out from backstage, and some woman will have tears in her eyes, our show affected her so much, so personally. That opens my eyes anew, changes my perspective of what I can do towards making a change for my community, which I’ve always wanted to do. Sometimes you have to sacrifice to keep that hope alive, because maybe that’s all they have.”

[Frances Madeson is also the author of “Indigenous States,” Article 2 in this series, posted on 27 March.

[The last two articles in “Staging Our Native Nation” will be posted on 8 April.  Please log back onto ROT to read the final two parts of the AT series—and be sure to read the foregoing four articles.  I remind you, too, that at the end of Articles 7 and 8, I will be posting a list of resources for native theater in the U.S., published by American Theatre as well.]

"Staging Our Native Nation"

Article 4

[Rob Weinert-Kendt’s “Raising Native Voices, Then Amplifying Them,” below, is the first article in this series I’m posting on Rick On Theater that doesn’t appear in the print edition of the Theatre Communication Group’s American Theatre; it’s published only on AT’s website.  In his piece, Weinert-Kendt presents an interview with Randy Reinholz, co-founder, with his wife, actress Jean Bruce Scott, of Native Voices, an organization that supports and promotes theater by the United States’ indigenous peoples.  Hosted now at the Autry Museum of the American West In Los Angeles (founded by and named for the original “singing cowboy,” Gene Autry), New Voices was launched 25 years ago at the University of Illinois, where Reinholz was a professor, and has been working for a quarter of a century toward a surge of interest in and focus on native American theater.

[As always, I urge ROTters to go back and read Articles 1 and 2 if you haven’t yet.  “Native Women Rising” by Madeline Sayet was posted on 24 March, Frances Madeson’s “Indigenous States” on 27 March, and “Law of Nations” by Celia Wren on 30 March.]

RAISING NATIVE VOICES, THEN AMPLIFYING THEM

by Rob Weinert-Kendt

After years of nurturing writers and performers, the work of L.A.’s Native American theatre is finally paying off.

If there is a resurgent tide of Native American voices in the American theatre of late—and based on the stories in this special issue, there certainly seems to be—a lot of the credit can be traced to a seemingly unlikely place: a theatre program that runs out of the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles. Randy Reinholz, who has run Native Voices at the Autry with his wife, Jean Bruce Scott, for 20 years, was at first skeptical himself about partnering with the institution named for the singer of “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.” But to his pleasant surprise, he found that the Autry had a real appetite for telling the whole story of the conquest and settlement of the American West in all its bloody complications and from all perspectives, including Native Americans’.

So this actor, director, and theatre professor, a member of Oklahoma’s Choctaw nation who’d started Native Voices a few years before at Illinois State, relocated the program to L.A., where the Native population, the nation’s second-highest, numbers more than 50,000, and film and TV opportunities have attracted many of the nation’s Native actors and writers.

Native Voices has since found not only a local audience for their work but a national one: Their roster now includes more than 34 full productions, 20 tours, 23 new-play festivals, and 13 playwrights’ retreats. The impact of their training and nurturing generations of Native talent is harder to measure, but it has clearly paid dividends in both the quantity and quality of artists now working at all levels throughout the American theatre, from Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where Off the Rails, Reinholz’s own Native-themed riff on Measure for Measure, played last year, to Alaska’s Perseverance Theatre, where Reinholz recently directed the premiere of Lucas Rowley’s dark comedy William, Inc.

I spoke to Reinholz recently about the slow but sure rise of Native theatre and the challenges.

ROB WEINERT-KENDT: One reason we decided to do a special issue on Native American theatre is that this seems to be a moment of raised or renewed consciousness about Native artists and themes, both at culturally specific institutions and at historically white theatres. But obviously this is not new to you.

RANDY REINHOLZ: Right. Actually this is what our plan was: to make a path for Native people into the professional theatre. It took longer than we thought, and we’re glad to see it happen. As you know, theatre’s so collaborative, and obviously it takes money, but it also takes a building, a space, a staff to make it happen. And as we started trying to move our storefront ideas into proper theatre spaces—that just took longer than most of us expected.

In addition to the influence of your organization, why do you think this wave of Native work is cresting now?

I think it’s generational. Certainly Spiderwoman, Hanay Geiogamah, Tomson Highway, Bill Yellow Robe were a generation before, and they were allowed in the back door of the theatre occasionally. But Native Americans were mostly told, “You can’t act because there aren’t plays by Native Americans, and you can’t write because there are no Native actors.” So there was a prejudice, and a self-fulfilling prophecy by well-resourced theatre institutions, that Native Americans simply weren’t part of the discussion or part of the reflection.

I’m a first-generation college student in my family. I think higher education was accessible for a number of folks, and it seems that theatre wants people with those credentials, particularly in administrative positions, working within the system. I had the privileged position of being at a university, so I had health insurance and a salary. A number of us had institutional positions where we were the one Native person who somehow broke the mold. Then we made space for this new generation, and you have a number of artists in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who are really making some noise now.

And I think theatres were embarrassed. I remember at the TCG National Conference in San Diego [2014], it was the first time that there were spaces identified as safe affinity spaces for black, Latino, Asian. And there were also a large number of Native Americans there, about 8 or 10, and at about the third meeting where people were talking about what was going on, I said, “You have to come up with a phrase where you mention there are Native people in the audience, because even people of color are erasing us.” I think that was a consciousness-raising moment for the people of color in TCG.

How did Native Voices get started, and how did it end up at a Western heritage museum named for a Hollywood cowboy?

First of all, something that would be interesting to put somewhere in your article, is that our papers are archived now at the Autry, and we’re looking to make them available digitally. Our hope is that we can make readily known the strategies we employed, the kinds of funders we had, and how our evolution progressed, so that the next generation of companies can happen faster. We need these companies geographically spread throughout the country.

So I was a professor at Illinois State, and they liked a Moliere play I directed, so they asked me to direct a contemporary play from my culture. I didn’t know of any Native scripts; I’d always wanted to work on Native plays, I just didn’t know any. We met Bill Yellow Robe and we learned of Native Earth in Toronto, a company founded by Tomson Highway and Larry Lewis. We went up to see their staged readings, met Drew Hayden Taylor, who was the artistic director at that time and is a wonderful playwright. He shared some of his favorite plays. And we met Joseph Dandurand and Marie Clements—she’s a Governor’s General Award winner in Canada. [The Governor General’s Awards are a collection of annual awards presented by the Governor General of Canada, recognizing distinction in numerous academic, artistic, and social fields. ~Rick] They became our first cohort, and we brought them to Illinois State in 1993 to see if a predominantly white institution could adequately serve Native playwrights and mount a Native play. From that we learned that we had Native students, and people who had been disenfranchised within their own program. It was my second year at Illinois State.

We had this gathering called Native Voices. We read the plays, and saw how they fit on our students. We found a play we could produce, and we did the same thing again the following year, ’94 and ’95. From that work, we started meeting some other people who were working in Native communities. We were actors in Los Angeles, so we used to return there each summer, and we went over to the Autry to say hello. They were anxious for us to look at some of their exhibitions and galleries from a Native perspective. You know, it’s very difficult to look at Western history, particularly 30 years ago, with a Native lens, because it was mostly about conquest and colonization. We were a little embarrassed, wondering how we would say anything to the Autry—but it turned out they actually wanted to have a difficult conversation and to bring their own institution into the 21st century. We soon realized that one of the best things we could do would be to put Native people in charge of their own stories on stages, with examples of the issues in Native communities in Indian country and in America. We started in 1999 with Marie Clements’s one-woman show, Urban Tattoo.

So the Autry had an appetite for tough stories, and we found an audience in Los Angeles that also was interested in that. Our audiences tend to be about 30 to 40 percent Native, depending on the year. Then there’s also a theatre community in Los Angeles that is mostly denigrated and marginalized by the East Coast, it seems, and they were anxious to be part of another voice being enfranchised.

So here we are 20 years later, making space for Native people to be the center of a play, at a time when Native people have mostly stood to the side and said “yes” and “no” as actors. As they got the chance to play leads in stories that resonated from their own cultures, you started seeing a lot more Native people showing up in theatre and on television, so that when Oregon Shakespeare Festival went to cast my play Off the Rails a few years ago, they were confident they could find the actors. Actors Equity let them know there were 39 Equity members that had Native American heritage in the United States, and they were shocked. There are a lot more in the Screen Actors Guild, because television is hiring Native people. That paradigm is moving now. People are starting to feel less like outsiders in that conversation, and thinking, “I could do something.”

It does seem that if you’re doing a play anywhere in the U.S. that requires Native actors, you need to go to L.A. and talk to Native Voices. It reminded me of that way East West Players started both as a theatre company to stage their own work but also as a talent database for Asian-Pacific Islanders. Have you compared notes or talked shop with other culturally specific theatres or theatres of color?

Yeah, we get together and talk a lot: East West Players, Latino Theatre Company, Robey Theatre Company. Tim Dang of East West chaired a board for the L.A. Arts and Culture Commission for the county, and we met for two years to talk about what we could do to better represent the populations in the county. Maybe because our population is large in this region, we kind of merit a demographic consideration, a political consideration, that other parts of the country feel comfortable ignoring. But I think as the country starts to come to grips with our love for violence and the taking of things, we will start to think more about what happened in Native communities, and perhaps have some interest in that part of our history. We’ve been so excited about erasing that part of our history as a country.

So, yes, we have benefited so much from speaking with and working strategically with other communities. But Native Americans are different, in that this was once Indian land.

Whenever we write about theatre work among communities that have been marginalized that are now getting their story told in some way, we think about three components: their stories being told at all; members of that community getting the opportunity to write and perform the work; and finally theatres developing longterm audiences among that community. It sounds to me like all those components were part of your strategic thinking.

Also, you provide training for people at each of those levels. That’s been a big part of Native Voices. So at times we’ve provided acting classes. We certainly have always provided playwriting opportunities and places to make work. We’ve had some ensemble and group creative work. Each of those phases are things that normal theatre artists just expect to encounter, probably through their theatre training or a multitude of professional experiences where they get those opportunities. And Native artists—again, when you relegate everyone to “yes sir,” “no sir,” “that way,” “this way” lines, you sort of guarantee they’ll never be brought into the process.

So that’s been the strategy: to get the artists in position to deliver the work, so when they’re seen by the greater professional community, they hold up. They look like they belong. They don’t look like an anomaly, or it’s charity work, or at an Indian request.

The play you just directed at Perseverance, William, Inc. [Jan.-Feb. 2018], sounds pretty wild. Tell me about it.

Well, we’ve been working in Alaska since 2010. My wife’s family has been there since the ’70s, going back and forth. That particular play is so specifically Alaskan. Native people are organized as corporations in Alaska, not as tribes, by the U.S. government. Of course, that has all the advantages and shortfalls of any government that focuses on the bottom line in its attempt to serve people. And so the writer took that set of given circumstances and turned it into this sort of absurd look at what it means to be Native in Alaska—dealing with substance abuse, sexual abuse, violence. It’s incredibly funny, but you sort of have to be deeply aware of Alaskan issues for the jokes to land. In Alaska, it’s hysterical, but I don’t see it playing too much in the lower 48.

What struck me is that it doesn’t sound at all like a dutiful historical drama, and that some of the writing that’s emerging from Native artists seems to genre-bending, time-hopping, meta-theatrical, playing with the form in ways we’re familiar with now in the age of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Young Jean Lee. Is that a trend you’re seeing too?

I totally see where that view comes to you with this particular set of 2017-18 plays. Perhaps my longer view is, after the intentional stifling of Native voices in American culture, the first thing the group does when they get their voice back is talk about the oppression. So for the first decade in the States, and certainly the first 20 years in Canada, Native theatre was all about this systematized effort to oppress and colonize. Also, any Native play that aspires to reach beyond a Native audience has to deal with the fact that the audience doesn’t know much about Native people, is filled with intentional misinformation about Native people.

But that’s sort of the first play a playwright writes: They write from their own experience. You start to hear about families, and then from families, you start to hear other kinds of issues. And we have a group of theatre artists now writing their 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th play, and they’ve got other things to talk about.

Off the Rails was 30 percent Shakespeare and 70 percent invention, and it’s all about the boarding school system. It’s a piece of history, but we realized we couldn’t approach that piece of history from a realistic standpoint, because how do you stage cultural genocide? Atrocity is pretty tough to put on a stage, and ask anybody to stay. So we looked at comedy.

Maybe another way to ask a similar question is to ask not whether Native theatre artists are developing plays that bend or break the dominant Western forms, but what have Native artists brought to the form from their own cultures? Is there a Native aesthetic?

Yeah, a couple things. Diane Glancy, one of our more accomplished Native playwrights, talks about how Native plays will always have reciprocity. And part of that is: I tell a story, which makes you think of your story, which shakes loose her story. And then when she tells me her story in return, I really start to understand my story, new and deeper. Native stories by and large are just retelling old stories with a teaching piece meant for cultural wisdom. So that’s a big hallmark of Native plays. Often they’re more interesting after you’ve heard them and thought about them a few times.

Another thing that happens, not in all Native plays, but in a lot of Native plays—there are a lot of spirits onstage. There are a lot of other people, from other worlds. A play like Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty [see Article 3, 30 March], you might say it ping-pongs back and forth between the present and the past. But a Native way of looking at that might be that those are just spirits that augment the contemporary story, and you can’t really understand the contemporary story unless you know this information that the spirits are bringing.

I would say, too, that music is interpreted differently. There’s almost always music and dance in Native plays. And the music has different meanings based on how well you know it. It’s easy to make a parallel with Western cultures in terms of ideas of faith: If you come from a system of faith, there are certain songs that come from that tradition that have different meaning to people who come from that faith than people who are outsiders to that faith. And Native songs, vocables often, have absolute meaning to people from those traditions, even though it’s not concrete language.

There are certain pieces of Native songs that are shared well across tribal identities. Still, you know, we have over 500 tribes in the country, with distinct languages, traditions, and cultures. How do we cross those boundaries? In some ways, I hope that’s what Native theatre brings to the country: the answers to the problems we’re facing as a country. How do we move beyond the isolationism that’s in vogue at the moment into bigger conversations with the rest of the people we should be in conversations with?

So things are looking up for Native artists and theatres, and you’ve accomplished a lot in the decades Native Voices has been around. What challenges do you see ahead for Native theatre?

What comes up in the TCG conversations about equity, diversity, and inclusion is, what’s a healthy ecosystem for Americans and American theatre? I think there has to be a way of continuing to support emerging Native voices as Native identity continues to evolve, and the idea of what it means to be Native American is not always influenced by suicide, addiction, violence, degradation. What are the other pieces of what it means to be Native American? And then, how are those voices supported and nurtured so that they belong to an American theatre that is not relegated to the storefronts and the emerging artists, never to be part of the professional system?

One exciting thing that happened after Off the Rails is that there are now nine, maybe 10, Native actors in the company at Oregon Shakes this season, and Mary Kathryn’s play there now, Manahatta,only has six Native roles. So those actors are part of the company now. They’re not just there to do this narrow set of Native roles. And that was super intentional on OSF’s part. You know, not every American theatre needs to follow that. They all have their own communities to serve and axes to grind. So where would be some places we could fit in? You know, William, Inc. is the third play written by a Native, directed by a Native, with a predominantly Native cast at Perseverance, and they’ve got another one on the books for next season and two more in the pipeline.

Who else is gonna do that work? Where does it belong? And how are we not going to put all the marginalized voices in competition for a few dollars? What does the industry want and need, and how can it benefit from these diverse voices? And what are the revenue streams?

These are all the questions on your mind at Native Voices.

Certainly. My wife and I, Jean Bruce Scott, are the co-founders, and next year will be our 20th anniversary in Los Angeles, and our 25th altogether. And if everything goes according to schedule, we’ll announce the new leadership of Native Voices in the next generation. So what does that mean, what does it become, and then how does that fit into a greater whole? You don’t need a beacon of hope. That might be a good sales pitch, but it’s a terrible way to make theatre. We need to have an ecosystem. And how do we fit with the East West Players, Latino Theater Company, Robey Theater Company?

And, though we often look to the large organizations, maybe there are coalitions in midsize professional companies. Maybe that’s part of the answer, rather than constantly looking to LORT theatres for everything. It seems LORT theatres are exhausted from trying to serve all these constituencies.

[Rob Weinert-Kendt is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.  He was the founding editor-in-chief of Back Stage West and writes about theater for the New York Times, Time Out New York, and the Los Angeles Times.  He studied film at USC and is a composer member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop.

[The next article in AT’s “Staging Our Native Nation” series will be posted on 5 April.  A list of Native American theaters and resources and the names of more than 100 living Native American writers and theatermakers will be posted after the final installment of this series.  The AT series, including those articles that appear in the print edition of the magazine, are available on the TCG website, accessible from https://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/native-american-theatre/.]

"Staging Our Native Nation"

Article 3

[From 15 January to 15 February this year, 25 theaters in the Washington, D.C., area staged the Women’s Voices Theater Festival, which presented works written entirely by women.  Among those plays was Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty, performed at Arena Stage from 12 January to 18 February under the direction of artistic director Molly Smith (who founded Juneau, Alaska’s Perseverance Theatre, featured in Article 2, “Indigenous States,” of this series, posted on 27 March).  Celia Wren’s “Law of Nations,” below, recounts the development and staging of that production, which was also part of Arena’s Power Plays initiative to commission and develop new plays and musicals  that will center on politics and power, and examines some of the special issues faced by Smith, her cast, and her creative team to stage this play about Cherokee history and current concerns.

[As always, I strongly urge readers of Rick On Theater to go back and read the previous installments in the “Staging Our Native Nation” series: “Native Women Rising” by Madeline Sayet (posted on 24 March) and Frances Madeson’s “Indigenous States” (27 March).]

LAW OF NATIONS

by Celia Wren

At Arena Stage, Mary Kathryn Nagle’s ‘Sovereignty’ set out to reclaim Native stories—and bodies.

                                                 

“There’s a lot of humor in the play. Don’t be afraid to laugh,” artistic director Molly Smith said to spectators seated in an Arena Stage rehearsal room on a brutally cold January afternoon. The circumstances seemed to demand such encouragement. Performed for designers and other need-to-know folk, the pre-tech run-through for Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty had begun with a fight call in which, in slow motion, with matter-of-fact professionalism, actors had practiced a sexual assault and a racial-slur-charged drunken brawl. Not exactly mirth-inducing fare.

Then, too, there were the play’s weighty themes: law, justice, politics, and the inherent rights of the Cherokee Nation. A buzzed-about world premiere, Sovereignty was an installment in Arena Stage’s Power Plays initiative, a project designed to commission and develop 25 new works exploring politics and influence in American history. Sovereignty would also be one of the marquee titles in the 2018 Women’s Voices Theater Festival in and around Washington, D.C., which ran Jan. 4-Mar. 4.

As if that context didn’t provide enough gravitas, Sovereignty was, on one level, an effort to address and correct the culture’s habit of ignoring, or at best misrepresenting, the Native American experience. “This will be, for many people, probably the most exposure they’ve ever had to anything Cherokee,” playwright Nagle had observed in an interview that morning. For this reason, she added, the play “needs to be as authentic as possible.”

Nagle has a rare vantage on the matter. An enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, she is not only a playwright but also a lawyer who has written briefs for federal appellate courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. As a partner with Pipestem Law P.C., she has focused on working to safeguard tribal sovereignty  and the inherent rights of Indian nations. In her view, this work is by no means separate from her playwriting, since the realms of law and representation are entwined. To erase or debase a people’s stories paves the way for the undermining of their rights, she suggests. Conversely, to tell a people’s story authentically is to take a step toward preserving those rights. As a lawyer, she said, “I’m doing work to restore the sovereignty and jurisdiction that the Supreme Court has taken away [from Native people]. You can’t do that work unless you change the narrative that allows the court to take it away. And part of that narrative is erasure! So to me, that’s a responsibility that I have.”

If the Oklahoma-based 35-year-old felt a professional obligation to make Sovereignty ring true, she also had a personal stake in the matter: Her script recalls a turning point in the lives of her great-great-great grandfather, John Ridge, and his father, Major Ridge, who reached a risky decision to sign a treaty with the U.S. government in 1835.

Just a few years prior, in Worcester v. Georgia, the Supreme Court had ruled for Cherokee Nation sovereignty. But the U.S. government, then led by President Andrew Jackson, declined to enforce that 1832 decision. So, under pressure from whites who coveted Cherokee land in the East, the Ridges signed the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, which ceded Cherokee land east of the Mississippi in return for payment plus land further west. The treaty—which paved the way for the Trail of Tears—was hugely controversial among the Cherokee people and was opposed by the tribe’s principal chief, John Ross. In 1839, after relocating west, the Ridges were assassinated.

Sovereignty doesn’t just revisit a 19th-century story, though: It also imagines a contemporary tale (technically, set a couple of years in the future) about a Cherokee lawyer named Sarah Polson, who champions Cherokee Nation sovereignty. This plot strand turns on the historic 1994 Violence Against Women Act, which, when renewed and expanded in 2013, gave tribal courts jurisdiction over non-Native Americans who assaulted women on tribal land. In Sovereignty, a case involving such an assault goes all the way to a Neil Gorsuch-era Supreme Court. The play darts back and forth in time, paralleling its 19th- and 21st-century court cases, as well as two bittersweet interracial love stories.

Nagle explained that she regularly makes a point of including contemporary Native American narratives in plays that otherwise depict history. “I feel I cannot write a play that only takes place in the past, because that could, and would, likely promote the narrative that we [Native Americans] only exist in the past,” she said.

The ingredients of Sovereignty have been brewing in Nagle’s brain for a long time. Born in Oklahoma and raised in part in Missouri and Kansas, she grew up hearing about the Ridges, whose portraits hung in her grandmother’s home, and stories about Worcester v. Georgia fed her aspirations to a legal career. In law school, while studying the many milestone legal cases that hurt the Native American cause, she began to mull writing a play that would “deconstruct” the myth of Native inferiority that arguably underlay such rulings.

Enter Molly Smith, who was on the lookout for vibrant, diverse American works for Arena Stage. As it happens, the artistic director has long been interested in Native American issues and culture: Prior to assuming Arena’s leadership in 1998, she headed Alaska’s Perseverance Theatre, where she oversaw productions drawing on indigenous voices and stories. What’s more, Smith’s partner, Suzanne Blue Star Boy, hails from the Yankton Sioux tribe of South Dakota.

Smith says she first heard about Nagle’s work from an Arena associate who passed along the playwright’s script Manahatta, about a 21st century securities trader whose ties to New York reach back to Native American history in the area in the 1600s (the play opens next month at Oregon Shakespeare Festival). “I read it, and I thought, this is a very interesting writer,” Smith recalls. A subsequent meeting with Nagle led to Sovereignty’s joining Arena’s Power Plays slate.

For Nagle, it was particularly meaningful to get a production in the nation’s capital, where decisions related to Native American rights have so often been in play. “The sovereign-to-sovereign relationship between Tribal Nations and the federal government—this is the seat of it,” she said.

And there’s that word: sovereignty. The legal concept of sovereignty refers to the right of a people to govern itself. A recognition that Native American tribes are equivalent to sovereign nations stretches back centuries. Around the time of the American Revolution, a Sovereignty character says, “The whole world recognized the sovereignty of Indian Nations, but no one recognized the United States.” Native tribes’ sovereignty was implicitly recognized in myriad treaties that tribes and the U.S. signed over the years.

The concept of sovereignty underpins some landmark Supreme Court cases, including 1978’s Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, which ruled that tribal courts did not have jurisdiction over non-Native individuals charged with committing crimes on tribal land. More recently, in Dollar General v. Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, a 4-4 Supreme Court split, issued months after Justice Antonin Scalia’s 2016 death, left intact a lower court’s ruling upholding the jurisdiction of a Choctaw tribal court to hear a civil suit against the low-cost retailer.

Nagle’s play Sovereignty adds another layer of resonance to the eponymous legal and philosophical concept: The play’s contemporary plotline, which touches on sexual abuse and VAWA, draws a parallel between the idea of nation-level sovereignty and the right of a woman to protect, and determine the integrity of, her own body. In the #MeToo moment, that’s a concept with gale-force urgency.

The final Sovereignty script called for a nine-person cast, with five actors portraying historic and contemporary Cherokee characters and four playing white characters. Casting was a national effort, employing both Skype and a flight to Los Angeles to audition actors—a necessary step for locating Native performers, as Nagle explained, for whom the rule has been to “go to L.A. to find work or don’t find work! Because TV and film have been, for better or for worse, hiring Native actors.”

Also in L.A. is Native Voices at the Autry, a theatre company dedicated to new works by Native American, Alaska Native, and First Nations playwrights. In addition to its developing and producing activities, Native Voices at the Autry has helped cast productions across the U.S., producing executive director Jean Bruce Scott says, including Sovereignty. Native Voices ensemble members Kyla Garcia and Kalani Queypo ultimately signed on to portray, respectively, Sarah Polson and John Ridge, while ensemble member Andrew Roa would juggle the roles of Major Ridge and a Ridge descendent. (Almost all the actors in the production depicted both 19th-century and contemporary characters.)

The show’s other performers included Jake Waid, an actor and Tlingit tribe member whom Smith knew from her time in Alaska, and D.C.-stage fixtures Michael Glenn and Dorea Schmidt. Some of the actors appeared in early workshops of the play; there would be four workshops in all.

Smith had decided to direct the production herself. Asked if she had had any concerns about tackling the project, as a director who is not herself Native American, she said no. “It was a subject that was important to me,” she said. “As a director, I think that’s the most powerful piece [of artistic equipment] you could have.”

As the final production approached, Smith traveled to Oklahoma, where she visited the cemetery that is the Ridges’ final resting place, and got an up-close look at letters written by John Ridge and John Ross. Such preparatory groundwork “nourishes me, in a whole different way,” she said. “I also think that it shows respect for the ideas of the project.”

Smith wasn’t the only one to plunge into research: The show’s designers also sought information that would make Sovereignty both resonant and genuine. They faced other challenges, too, given that Nagle’s storytelling zips around swiftly in time and space, vaulting between locations like President Andrew Jackson’s Oval Office, an 1830s Georgia jail, and a 21st-century Cherokee Nation casino.

The rapid leaps among eras presented an obvious challenge to costume designer Linda Cho. “What you don’t want is actors just to be inundated with costume changes backstage that could throw off their performance. I needed something that could happen seamlessly,” said Cho, a Tony winner for A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder and a frequent collaborator at Arena.

After putting together her usual “bible” of research, Cho came up with a baseline layering strategy: Male characters wore the same trousers throughout, varying their looks with period-specific upper-body garments or accessories (jackets, neckwear, etc.) over contemporary, generally less-bulky tops. For example, the cravat and calf-length jacket actor Joseph Carlson wore to play a swaggering President Jackson quite concealed the grungy-casual look of his contemporary character, a detective named Ben.

Set designer Ken MacDonald also found a streamlined solution for the script’s zigzags through time and space. An artist who has worked on theatre and opera in the U.S. and Canada, he devised a Sovereignty set that was simple and relatively abstract, with white surfaces for locale-evoking projections (official seals; casino iconography; a newspaper’s front page) designed by Mark Holthusen. Furniture and other elements—Windsor chairs, a bar-counter-like wall, a fold-up day bed with lashed-on pillows—would have a timeless look. And running along the back would be a basket-weave pattern.

“I did an awful lot of research on Cherokee patterns of basket-weaving,” MacDonald said, recalling a process that involved book-buying, online sleuthing, and correspondence with a former Smithsonian-museum staffer. “I wanted to make sure I was really true to [the tradition]. Mary Kathryn Nagle was very concerned—and rightly so—that these were truly Cherokee patterns and weren’t confused with other patterns.”

Sound designer Ed Littlefield did his legwork, too, hunting up Oklahoma bird sounds for a scene set in the cemetery, for instance, and finding sample-worthy music by contemporary Native artists like the Canadian DJ collective A Tribe Called Red. (He credits Candice Byrd, Nagle’s friend and fellow Cherokee theatre artist, with putting him on the right track for the musical sound.) As frequently happens in theatre, during the rehearsal process, some of Littlefield’s early ideas were shelved: A 19th-century printing-press sound he’d been thrilled to track down ultimately gave way to a more stylized drumming that still evoked machinery, for instance. “You find the best sound for the show,” he said.

During the refinement of the designs and other production elements, Nagle wasn’t merely functioning as Sovereignty’s playwright: She was also the production’s Cherokee-culture sounding board, consultant, and expert eye. Asked if all that multitasking was tiring—she was also working her law job full-time throughout—she said yes.

“It’s scary too, because I don’t know everything,” she said. “I don’t! There’s a lot that I don’t know about my own culture.” That’s hardly surprising, she pointed out, since “most Native people in this country today live with the reality that to some extent, or to full extent, their culture and identity have been taken away from them.” She is working on regaining that lost heritage, she said. In the meantime, “What I have to do, in the best way possible, is ask for help and guidance from those that know more than I do.”

For example, she wanted the play to include some dialogue in Cherokee, though she doesn’t speak the language herself. So she consulted friends, who referred her to a Cherokee Nation contact with the familiar name of John Ross; Nagle says he not only translated her English-language lines into Cherokee, but also recorded the Cherokee versions, so that Roa (whose characters sometimes speak in Cherokee) could have a pronunciation model.

Sovereignty rehearsals began in early December. Relocating from L.A. to D.C. for an extended stretch, in the winter, was a significant undertaking, confessed actor Queypo. Still, he said, he never hesitated. Sovereignty is, “in the bigger picture, important to Native people and the history of Native storytelling in the American theatre, where we’ve been invisible for a long time,” he said.

At the end of the first week of rehearsals, Smith gave out a character-development assignment that is standard for her productions: Each performer would do an in-character improvisation introducing touchstones—a significant piece of paper, for instance—from the character’s life. Other cast members watch these improvisations, but, Smith observed, “What I say is, ‘This is just for the actor. There’s no value judgment.’” Queypo said there was “a gasp in the room when she presented the parameters of what we were going to do,” because the assignment would clearly be a source of “pressure,” but also “this activating energy.” On the day in question, Queypo brought in a letter written by young John Ridge to the love of his life, Sarah Bird Northrup, a white school steward’s daughter. Discoveries from the assignment ultimately informed Queypo’s first scene onstage, early in Act One, he said.

Kyla Garcia also found the exercise hugely helpful. “I learned so much about my character,” she said. She brought in a poem that Sarah Polson had written, with a first line running, “Justice in my blood.”

Meanwhile, as preparations for the production ramped up, Nagle found herself amazed at the resources Arena Stage had mustered. Previous airings of her plays had involved smaller theatres. At Arena, “Just the sheer number of people who are touching my show in some form or fashion is really mind-blowing,” she said.

Sovereignty began previews in Arena’s Kreeger Theater on Jan. 12, 2018, with an official opening following on Jan. 24. Writing afterwards in the Washington Post, Peter Marks found the play edifying and so “worthwhile” that it practically deserved a public-service award. But he noted that, because “Nagle’s characters…spend a lot of time explaining themselves, at the expense of the more satisfying kind of revelation that allows an audience to discover on its own who they are,” the material’s dramatic potential was “not fully realized.”

Writing for the online DC Theatre Scene, Kate Colwell marveled at the “depth of historical knowledge” the play conveyed, and noted how resonant the script was at time when citizenship issues, women’s rights, and Native American activism (over the Dakota Access Pipeline, for instance) have been in the news. Still, she thought Nagle’s play rushed past moments that might otherwise have eloquently expressed character. In general, “the massive scope of [Sovereignty’s] ambition also weakens its emotional impact,” she wrote.

Critical quibbles notwithstanding, Sovereignty was ultimately more than just a theatrical production: It became a national event. The New York Times ran a feature on the show. Feminist icon Gloria Steinem participated—alongside Nagle and Smith—in a panel discussion after one performance.

Anyone attending the opening night performance would have spotted another achievement. When the play evoked human foibles and discomfiture—awkward romantic chitchat, kooky mishaps at a casino, a grandfather’s unease with changing diapers—the audience responded almost as if they’d heard Molly Smith’s early January advice. They laughed.

[Celia Wren is a former managing editor of American Theatre magazine.  She writes about theatre for the Washington Post and is the media critic for Commonweal and a frequent contributor to AT and the Richmond Times-Dispatch.  Her articles also have appeared in the New York Times, the Village Voice, Newsday, the Boston Globe, the New York Observer, Smithsonian, and Broadway.com, among other publications.

[This is the last article of the “Staging Our Native Nation” series for American Theatre that appeared in the print edition of the magazine; the installments in the series that follow are available only on the website at https://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/native-american-theatre/.  (A list of Native American theaters and resources, and the names of more than 100 living Native American writers and theatermakers, will be posted after the final installment of this series.)

[Article 4 in AR’s “Staging Our Native Nation” will be posted in three days, 2 April.  Please come back to ROT then and for the subsequent installments as there is still much to be learned about this maturing American theater form emerging from its nest.]