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.]
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