Article 2
[Welcome to Article 2 of “Staging Our Native
Nation,” the American
Theatre series (from the April issue) on
theater by indigenous American peoples.
In “Indigenous States,” Frances Madeson looks at the efforts of native
Hawaiians and Alaskans to stage their stories at such venues as Honolulu’s Kumu
Kahua Theatre, the Honolulu Theatre for Youth, and Juneau’s Perseverance
Theatre. But native theater in the
United States isn’t just about
telling the stories of indigenous peoples; it also serves a much greater purpose
for it’s community as well: it’s a way of connecting—or reconnecting—the
younger members of the indigenous
community with their traditional culture. This phenomenon operates for the audiences,
certainly, but it also works for the nascent playwrights and indigenous actors
as well.
[Native theater also has another benefit: it
is a way of reviving and prolonging the native languages of Hawaiians and
Alaskan Tlingit and Inupiat as plays are being written and performed in the
native tongues. Tlingit actor Allan
Hayton says about performing in his native language, “It was as if all of those
years of loss and erosion of the culture had not occurred.” Cultural and linguistic restoration and
preservation, of course, as significant as they are, function alongside the
other purpose of native theater: to spread awareness among non-native audiences
of the stories, concerns, and issues of their fellow American whose identities
have been too long hidden.
[The articles in this series stand on their
own, but I recommend strongly that ROTters
keep up with all of them. So, go back to
24 March and read Madeline Sayet’s “Native Women Rising”—and come back in three
days to read the next installment of “Staging Our Native Nation.” ~Rick]
INDIGENOUS STATES
by Frances Madeson
Native
theatre in the U.S.’s two non-contiguous states, Alaska and Hawai’i, shows
resonant connections as well as telling differences.
The pace at which producers of Hawaiian and Alaskan Native theatres are creating original offerings specific to their lands and peoples and mounting them on their mainstages ranges somewhere in the giddy spectrum
between prestissimo and full-tilt boogie.
“We’re
experiencing a Native arts revival right now,” said Alaska Native playwright
Vera Starbard, whose autobiographical advocacy play Our Voices Will be
Heard was performed in Juneau, Anchorage, Hoonah, and Fairbanks.
“There was one in the ’70s, and we’re right in the middle of a pretty exciting
one now.”
Part of
the exhilaration comes as a result of resources to match the rhetoric of
support for Native theatre arts. In 2016 Starbard was granted $205,000 from the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to sustain her while she creates three full-length
Alaska Native plays over three years. Likewise, funding was obtained
for Dark Winter Productions, an ensemble production company Starbard
formed with her husband and a few other Native writers to ready their scripts
for staging.
There
is also an attitudinal shift by institutional gatekeepers toward inclusion of
Native theatre artists, some of whom have been maintaining the vision for a
very long time with minimal support. The first Hawaiian-language play presented
at the Kennedy Theatre at th-e University of Hawai‘i at
Mānoa was in February 2015, “in the theatre’s 51st season,” said Tammy
Haili’ōpua Baker, who wrote it as the inaugural offering of a Hawaiian theatre
program she helped establish in 2014. Her body of work includes two dozen plays
in Hawaiian and Pidgin written since 1995. She repeated for emphasis: “Half a
century to get anything Hawaiian on that stage.”
But now
that the vessel’s been unstoppered, there’s a growing groundswell of audience
demand for shows with Native-centric realities and expression.
“The
success of Our Voices was completely community-driven,” said
Starbard. “I never sent it anywhere, I never asked. It was a massive experience
of what a community can give you when they see it and want it.”
Tlingit
actor and playwright Frank Henry Kaash Katasse said he sees a category shift.
“Indigenous stories are now seen as American stories,” he
offered. “They need to be told and audiences need to hear them.”
And
crucially it’s not only at culturally specific companies that this work is
taking root. Katasse’s cultural identity play They Don’t Talk Back was
staged at California’s La Jolla Playhouse in 2016 and at
Alaska’s Perseverance Theatre in 2017. The new playwright got to see
two polar opposite but equally authentic portrayals of the role of his teenage
protagonist—one grittier, he said, and one more animated in his body language.
“I
couldn’t believe how different the actors were in their interpretations,” he
remarked. “I write these parts that are tricky, and think this will be so hard
to cast—a teenage Native actor that can dance and rap and do
monologues. And then we do find it, and it’s so rewarding.”
Katasse
teaches theatre in schools to Alaska Native kids, and encourages them to take
acting seriously. “They didn’t even know this was a career option,” he said.
Indeed,
to keep pace with demand, artistic directors Harry Wong III at Kumu Kahua
Theatre and Eric Johnson at Honolulu Theatre for Youth (HTY) on
Oahu, and Art Rotch of Perseverance Theatre in Juneau and Anchorage, are
prioritizing both actor training and play development. They’re actively
building capacity through initiatives such as the Playwright’s Circle, a
Perseverance program in which Starbard and Katasse are developing new works.
All three theatres have long histories and deep roots in their communities.
Perseverance
was founded in 1979 by Molly Smith as a theatre by, for, and about Alaskans.
Honolulu Theatre for Youth, which was established in 1955, is one of the oldest
children’s theatres in the country.
“HTY
has the best productions, the best acting,” said Wong about his neighboring
theatre. “I can’t say enough about what they do for our kids—they teach them
how to watch theatre. And Kumu Kahua benefits.”
Kumu
Kahua (“original source” in Hawaiian) was established in 1971 by university
students wishing to pursue experimental forms with Professor Dennis Carroll, an
Australian. Its emphasis under Wong’s artistic direction is expression for
ethnically diverse locals telling stories about Hawai‘i, a place where
no single ethnic group is a majority.
Katasse
received his degree at UH Mānoa and has nothing but accolades for the Honolulu
theatre scene.
“I did
a couple of shows for Harry Wong at Kumu Kahua,” Katasse recalled. “It’s one of
the gems of the American theatre—the quality, the topics, and making sure
they’re very specific to Hawai’i. Their shows have influenced my vision of
myself as a Tlingit playwright.”
UH
Mānoa’s newly established Hawaiian Theatre Department is the first and only
graduate academic program devoted to Hawaiian-language theatre in the world.
Everyone, perhaps especially Tammy Haili‘ōpua Baker, who birthed it, has high
hopes for the graduates’ potential impact in Hawai‘i.
“My
aspiration is to have one playwright and director for every four or five of the
eight islands in the archipelago,” said Haili‘ōpua Baker. “It’s important that
it happen all cross the island chain so that our stories can provide a
foundation for our children, and they do not feel they have to prove their
validity.”
In this
Haili‘ōpua Baker has a kindred spirit in Allan Hayton, language revitalization
program director at Doyon Foundation. Meanwhile, 3,000-plus miles away in
Fairbanks, Alaska, Hayton pursues theatre as a vehicle for cultural and
linguistic survival.
“We are
restoring balance,” Hayton said. “In indigenous tradition theatre is performed
to achieve something for the people and balance for the world in the natural
environment. Theatre is a healing art form in which we can address very serious
and difficult issues safely, and offer a larger healing for society.”
In artistic
terms this can translate into powerful, sometimes revelatory
juxtapositions. In Act III, Scene 4 of the 2004 Tlingit Macbeth,
Banquo’s ghost haunted Macbeth while wearing a raven transformation mask. The
mask was fabricated as a bird when closed, and opened to reveal Banquo’s
face—spirit and flesh, emblems of both realms. What poetry was lost in the
“translation” to plain English before translating to Tlingit was regained on
the Tlingit side, a language Hayton said is full of imagery and metaphor.
It
meant a lot to Hayton, who performed the role of Ross, to speak Tlingit
publicly. “It was as if all of those years of loss and erosion of the culture
had not occurred.”
For
Starbard, Alaska Native theatre artists literally standing on thousands of
years of storytelling tradition have nothing to prove.
“Our
goal as Native artists and theatremakers is not to develop this ‘uncultured’
audience so they can come in and understand what a Western theatre is like. I
think that’s the attitude taken sometimes,” she said, choosing her words with
great care. “I’m proud of Native artists who are pushing back against this
mindset. It’s not about how we can help our people adapt to the Western
theatre, but how we can help Western theatre to be an even more dynamic and
beautiful thing.”
For actor, storyteller, and playwright Moses Goods, the
core beauty of Hawaiian culture lies in its most cherished values in the
concept of Aloha (love, peace, and compassion) as articulated in an anagram by
Hawaiian poet and philosopher Pilahi Paki.
“A
equals akahai, meaning modesty; L stands for lokahi, or
togetherness; O is for olu‘olu, to be pleasant; H for ha‘aha‘a—humility;
and the second A is for ahonui, which is patience,” explains Goods.
He says
that Hawaiians are extremely humble, almost to the point of meekness, and that
the idea of self-promotion is foreign. But that’s the only to way to be, he
explained: “If I don’t try to live inside Aloha then I can’t call myself a
Hawaiian actor, versus an actor who happens to Hawaiian.”
Goods,
who is half Native Hawaiian and half African American serves as HTY’s
connection to Native communities, and speaks with elders and other advisers
about delicate matters such as permissions to present cultural elements in
HTY’s shows. Sometimes his report to Eric Johnson is that permission has been
denied.
“Many
times they’ll say no, we don’t want you to use this chant, but we’ll write you
an original chant that says some of the same things,” Johnson explained. “It’s
not ours to take, it’s theirs to give. As a non-indigenous producer, I have to
recognize that at times Moses or another cultural practitioner making the work
has much more responsibility on his shoulders than I do. We love this work, but
it is not uncomplicated to produce.”
Kumu
Kahua’s Harry Wong has occasionally adjusted the content of plays in deference
to audience sensitivities. This happened recently in a production of Wild
Birds, a drama by Eric Anderson set in 1839 in a mission school.
“The
lead missionary mispronounces a word but everyone’s afraid to correct him,”
Wong explained. “The children laugh and he realizes he’s saying it wrong.
Pronouncing the word wrong advances the story.”
But one
Hawaiian speaker in the audience was offended at the error and told Wong that
he should not allow the word to be said incorrectly. “So we stopped,” Wong
said. “The history of the repression is still so immediate. My own grandmother—they
beat her feet when she spoke Hawaiian. I have to find that balance between
telling a story theatrically and the feelings and memories of the people
watching it.”
Art
Rotch at Perseverance said he pays special attention to those kinds of tensions.
“Part
of the opportunity here is that we can learn a lot about what theatre is, and
the ways we can grow and change it,” explained Rotch. “It’s not just a matter
of diverse performance styles, but the very ways in which plays are discovered
and written down. Many of the ideas we’re exploring with Native writers and
directors involve a theory of change. Playwriting can be catalytic of broader
change if we work with intention.”
Katasse
gives big props to Rotch and Perseverance for making a commitment to Native
theatre, which he said is not an easy commitment to make. “This is the third
year in a row with a world premiere, and another one’s planned for next year.
It’s a gamble,” Katasse said. “We’re not bringing in Hamilton here!”
As a
children’s theatre that reaches 120,000 students on six different islands, HTY
is a “prime candidate to bring issues and discussion to young people and
teachers,” Johnson said. Part of what guides his thematic choices is his
conviction that in confronting an uncertain climate future “the children will
need the support of the stories.”
Hawai‘i
is the first state to commit to 100 percent renewable energy by 2045; in 2016,
38 percent of energy generation was from renewables and its electricity was the
most expensive in the U.S. HTY’s 2017-18 season, named “The Power of People,”
features a show called Shocka: The Story of Energy & Hawaii.
“In
creating work for 10-year-olds we have the opportunity to look forward in a
really beautiful way,” Johnson said.
HTY is
also collaborating on projects in Tasmania and Micronesia, island societies
facing similar perils from warming, rising seas, acidic oceans, and drought.
“From this very specific community, we can be and are connected globally in an
exciting new way,” Johnson said.
Perseverance
Theatre is also looking ahead. Next season will feature not only a new show
featuring a new Native playwright and director, but also a completely
non-Western creative team.
“We can
create an aesthetic that’s really non-Western. I don’t think we know where it’s
going to take us,” Rotch said, “but we need to do the journey.”
[Frances Madeson is a writer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
She’s a freelance journalist and
playwright, and the author of three novels, including the comic Cooperative Village (Carol MRP/CO, 2007).
[For a list of Native American theaters and resources, and the names of
more than 100 living Native American writers and theatermakers, see the
final installment of this series. The AT series,
including those articles that don’t 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/.]
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