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.]
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