by Todd London
[In the first
installment of “‘Superheroes on Native Land,’” posted
on 21 January, ROTters met Lakota
playwright Larissa FastHorse, the Cornerstone Theater Ensemble, and the Oyate—that
is, the people of D/N/Lakota nations across what’s now known as South Dakota. In the second installment, published on 24 January,
they met the cast of Native performers and got to know a bit about the
play, Wicoun, the story of protagonist Áya’s transition into a male
superhero named Ahí. Now it all must
come together and hold together—for a month and across 2,000 miles. This is the topic of Part 3 of the series,
posted below.
[“Superheroes on Native
Land, Part 3” originally ran in TCG’s American
Theatre on 19 December 2023 (AMERICAN THEATRE | Superheroes on Native Land, Part 3). Since Todd London’s
“Superheroes” is a continuous story, I strongly recommend that readers who are
just encountering the report go back and read Parts 1 and 2 before reading Part
3.]
In the series’ final installment, Cornerstone tours
Larissa FastHorse’s play through the D/N/Lakota nations, with quietly, joyously
transformative results—and learns to say goodbye.
Touring Without a Net
May, 2023
At the heart of
this story: More things go wrong, some tragic, some comic, some elemental.
Áya and Khoskala make it to Rapid City, and so does the
show, Wicoun. [See Part 2 for the identification of these characters,
as well as ither details of the play and its production. Wicoun is
pronounced Wich’oon and means ‘way of life’ in Lakota.]
In Áya’s quest to become a superhero, the archenemies are,
“Um, the same as everyone: Racism. Poverty. Drugs. Capitalism. Colonial
societal structures. Destruction of the environment. Land back. Humidity.”
Cornerstone’s obstacles, by contrast, seem pretty tame: wind, rain, lightning,
noise, distance, last-minute confirmations from venue partners. Also humidity.
The whole time Wicoun is rehearsing in
Placerville [the retreat camp in Rapid City, S.D. where the company is
rehearsing]—and for months prior—the company tries to lock down performance
sites and timing. It’s a small band touring, but trying to cover the whole
state and hit almost all the reservations is still a massive undertaking. The
play will ultimately perform in 17 venues across the state in 23 days, but just
two weeks before the first show, only 10 are confirmed.
It’s notable that, in this ensemble context, every member of
the Cornerstone Theater Company [L.A. experimental theater troupe, the
production company] team understands every piece of the puzzle. The daily
production meetings at Placerville involve [playwright] Larissa [FastHorse] as
well as director Michael John Garcés, Cornerstone managing director Megan
Wanlass, the designers, ensemble members Peter Howard and Kenny Ramos, company
manager Paula Donnelly, as well as the production staff. The logistics are
mind-bending: When will we have a second car? What if, on the day we reserved
the only cargo van at the Rapid City Penske, it isn’t there?
The hotel in Sioux City won’t return our calls; what if they won’t give us the
group rate for our block of rooms? We’re 10 days…eight days…five days out, and
(fill in the blank) won’t call back to confirm a performance!
Wicoun needs to rent each venue for four
hours—90 minutes for arrival and load-in, 60 for strike—but no one’s sure yet
how long the show will be. Seventy-five minutes? More? Less? What if they have
to wait for audiences to arrive, especially on the Rez, where folks don’t work
with the same urgency or on the same clock and where “curtain time” doesn’t
mean shit? Where should flyers be dropped and posted in Crow Creek for people
to see them—the two gas stations, the casino? Will people on the Rez respond to
digital invitations? Is one performance venue, Little Wound [tribal K-12 school] in
Kyle, preferable to another two miles away? “It’s only two miles, but gas costs
money,” someone helpfully points out.
It seems like “divine providence” that sound designer Talon
Bazille Ducheneaux joins one meeting that producer Michael Garcia encouraged
him to “save himself” from: Talon’s partner has valuable connections in Okreek,
plus a sister at Sinte Gleska University [public tribal land-grant
university in Mission, S.D., on the Rosebud Indian Reservation], where they’re
hoping to perform but don’t have a strong contact. “Good luck getting anyone
there unless you have a feed or grill off,” Talon cautions, echoing the warning
of a comic nerd in the play who says, “Rule one when gathering Indians: There
must be food.”
It’s hard enough to plan, but it’s impossible to create back
up plans without understudies, equipped and weather-protected spaces, clear
seating (though reservation folks are used to bringing their own camp chairs to
gatherings), or presenting infrastructure at the venues. Will the weather gods
return their calls?
The set-up on day two couldn’t be more different than in the
bucolic Black Hills where they did the show’s first preview [Placerville Camp,
25 May 2023]. The van and scenery fill the parking lot outside Racing
Magpie, a small but mighty Lakota arts center and residency program in Rapid
City, which put out the call out for local artists to work with the show.
(Painter and retired Lakota language teacher Matt Uses Knife—Matthew—responded
at his daughter’s urging). At Black Hills Playhouse the day before
there were rolling forests; now there are rolling trucks, cars that slow on the
street (or is it an alley?) to watch the show before driving on. Tables of
local arts and crafts—jewelry, paintings, printed shirts, and tote bags—add to
the feel of an urban art fair. The condenser on Papa’s Frybread Wagon, the food
truck parked on one side of Racing Magpie, keeps running through much of the
performance. Camp chairs mix with the folding ones Larissa and Michael fetch
from inside the low-rise building. The actors need extra projection to get the
sound out, and it’s harder to read the audience as city sounds drown their
laughter. The wind is noisy too. Rural outdoor drama one day, street
performance the next. This isn’t the kind of theatre that keeps life out behind
four walls. It’s theatre whose very essence is to let life in.
Despite the challenges, there’s something so right about the
Racing Magpie lot, like the way the set, adorned with graffiti artist Focus
Smith’s spray-can art and Matthew’s landscape painting—together with the comic
book signs and bold costumes and puppets—jibes with the wall mural covering the
adjacent building. The sprawling city mural with stenciled letters and bison
heads under the words “Oceti Sakowin Territory” offers visual
counterpoint to the panoramic backdrops, horizons of a different color. This
vibrant stylistic profusion is visible everywhere in these Native communities;
on streets, in galleries, at outdoor fairs, alleyways, and powwows, you’ll see
drawings, prints, paintings, photographs, quilts, beadwork, regalia, sculpture.
[Part
1 introduces the Lakota term Oceti Sakowin, but doesn’t actually explain
or translate it. (Wicoun’s subtitle
is A Play With and About the Oceti Sakowin.) Instead, playwright FastHorse and Cornerstone
artistic director Michael John Garcés insist that readers look it up
themselves: Belonging
to the Land - Oceti Sakowin | Teacher Resource (si.edu). (I found this site frustrating to peruse, but
there are others online, so feel free to google the phrase.]
A word about scenic designer Nephelie Andonyadis’s work with
local artists. Her first design project with Cornerstone, back in the mid-’90s,
was part of a long engagement the ensemble had with the Watts section of
Los Angeles. She was looking to do with design what Cornerstone did with story
and performance: Engage the community in the making. Nephelie designed an
all-white projection surface, then created workshop projects with 4-H Club kids
and residents of a senior center in Watts. With the kids she made mandalas and
foamcore mazes from stuff found at Materials for the Arts and “hauled around in
the back of my car. We would walk in—30 kids in a room—share the set design,
ask if they would help us make the set.” With the elders she made paper birds.
She collected everything they made. The set became an installation made from
“all of that.” The mandalas and mazes became the walls, and the birds the
ceiling. “People came to see the play and they could find the piece of the set
they had made,” she recalls.
[The
Watts project to which Andonyadis refers was The Central Ave. Chalk Circle,
adapted by Lynn Manning from Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle
and performed at the Watts Labor Community Action Committee Center, November
1995. Mandalas are geometric figures representing the universe in Hindu and
Buddhist symbolism.
[Foamcore
is a lightweight, easily cut material used for mounting photographic prints, as
backing for picture framing, for making scale models, and in painting. It
consists of a board of polystyrene foam clad with an outer facing of paper on
either side.
[Materials
for The Arts, now known as L.A. Shares, was created in 1991 by the City of Los
Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. It’s a nonprofit program that receives
donations of reusable goods and materials, both new and slightly used, from the
local business community and redistributes them free-of-charge to nonprofits
and schools throughout the city.]
This first project became the model for much that followed,
right up to her work with Focus and Matthew on Wicoun. “It was me
designing something and bringing materials and asking people to join in
co-creation, so they could make a piece that was their own,” Nephelie explains.
Wicoun’s painted backdrop was Matthew’s idea
from the start. As an older man, he didn’t connect to the comic book aspects of
the play, but he instinctively knew there needed to be a backdrop of the Black
Hills, the heart of Lakota culture and site of its creation myth. “I learned so
much about the mountains from the way he chose to paint them,” Nephelie admits,
adding that she also “learned a lot from the way Focus paints,” including the
use of special paints and spray caps. His work is “all about representation and
literally changing the environment and transforming the walls within which
people in the community live. He thinks of it as transformative art. Wow.”
Like Larissa waiting for the script to emerge from the
community, and professional actors “working alongside somebody who maybe hasn’t
performed before but who is authentically right for their role,” Nephelie knows
this work isn’t about her. It trains her for “letting go of ego and for not
being at the center of it all, and for flexing and figuring out how to make it
work and what’s really important.”
This process of community co-creation extends to other
production elements as well. The show opens with a song commissioned from and
sung by Tiana Spotted Thunder, a much-loved Lakota recording artist from
Pine Ridge [an Oglala Lakota Indian reservation in South Dakota and Nebraska].
Costume designer Jeanette Godoy turns to a Lakota Cultural Bearer [a member of
a community or society who keeps its traditions alive by teaching them or
modeling them for the younger generations] named Anthony KȞaŋgi TȞaŋka to
design the traditional regalia Áya dons to become Ahí. And though she draws on
her own Mexican indigeneity as she goes, Jeanette consults with Oglala Lakota
fashion designer Tosa Two Heart—who also happens to be Kenny’s best friend and
the source of his finest threads—to get things right.
If words seem to have been lost in the city racket at Racing
Magpie, an encounter after the show makes it clear they weren’t. An excited
little girl, maybe 5 years old, approaches several performers in turn, her
mother hanging back. She still has baby teeth on one side of her mouth and
mostly gums on the other. She tells each actor the same story: She recently
lost a tooth—and had a cavity! Her favorite part of the play was when Áya
threatened the cousin-sibling children that if they didn’t go to sleep immediately,
there’d be no Cheerios for a week, only oatmeal! And with no sugar! “No sugar!”
the little girl repeats, giddy with delight. She imitates the horrified puppet
children before they conk out to rescue themselves from that dreadful,
unsweetened fate. She bursts out laughing each time she tells it: “No sugar!”
That night, after the Racing Magpie show, it rains. The next
morning, production manager Ash Nichols and stage manager Maria V.
Oliveira discover that the cargo van leaks. Rather than trying to wrangle
another—Penske in Rapid offers just the one—the troops empty the van, find the
suspected leak in the upper corner on the passenger side of the cargo bay, and
cover the corner inside and out with tarps, also tarping everything
cardboard—i.e., pretty much everything. The set pieces and puppets have stayed
dry, but many of the costumes are soaked inside their hanging bags.
Fortunately, there’s one more day at Placerville, so Jeanette, the designer who
doubles as dresser for the tour, airs the clothes on the copious lodge porches.
She irons and dries where possible.
Main Street, Rapid City
That evening, though, as the company arrives for another
Rapid City performance—this time at Main Street Square in the center of
town—several superhero costumes are still damp, a bad omen. I drive into town
with Michael and Larissa, and when we arrive, the square is still full of
families, kids playing in sprays from a water park on one side. Other company
cars pull up and report having driven through rain. A few heavy drops spatter
us. Soon we’re all staring at our phones, each with different weather apps,
each with different forecasts, though almost all predict heavy thunderstorms
between 6 and 8, the hours at which load-in begins and the show ends. The only
contingency plan is cancellation, because with sets, props, and puppets made of
cardboard, and no covering for the audience—their chairs will rest on Astroturf
between a bandshell and the water playground—there’s no way to stay dry.
Company manager Paula Donnelly gathers us together on the
bandstand, but everyone’s in wait-and-see mode. No one has an actual plan.
Nephelie makes a proposal: Use the raised bandstand as a large backstage area.
Lay the puppets on tarps over the cement platform instead of the usual tables.
Cover them for now. Let the actors carefully climb and descend the steps to
change clothes or grab props. Meantime, set everything up with sandbags and
clamps.
Load-in begins, interrupted immediately by an emergency
signal shrieking out of the square’s overhead speakers, warning of severe
thunderstorms throughout the nearby counties, with winds up to 60 miles an
hour. Michael says he’s “short on optimism and long on hope.” Everyone checks
their apps again, calculating the chance and timing of rain and wind. Scenery,
props, costumes, and sound equipment get unpacked and set. The clouds are dark
and full, but the wind is calm and the chance of rain (on my phone at least)
has fallen to 30 percent and shifted to 8 p.m., near the show’s end. Intrepid
audience members gather in camp chairs and on blankets in the square. We track
cloud movement and watch for breaks in the sky, praying this part of town
catches one. At 6:55 my phone predicts thunderstorms starting in 13 minutes and
lasting two hours.
The performance begins, even as lightning intensifies in the
distance and rolling thunder creates an ominous soundtrack under the opening
chorus of hate toward the two-spirit cousins. Over my shoulder I hear
Clementine Bordeaux say, “It’s tornado weather.” Right—we’re still in the
Midwest, Toto.
More wind. Horizontal lightning rings the Main Street
Square. Elder Superhero enters, slow-talking the zombie characters, and as the
cousin-siblings Khoskalaka and Áya settle down to their schoolwork, the rain
comes—first in a drizzle and then, after Michael calls hold, in a downpour. The
audience packs to go, the pause becomes cancellation, and the company scrambles
to cover the cardboard pieces and the sound equipment. Large hail falls next,
bouncing off the cement plaza, and we all work to move the whole caboodle under
the overhang. I climb a ladder and, with Kenny and Nephelie’s guidance, untie
the backdrop curtain and unscrew the long pipe that holds it.
I’m afraid of the lightning. I think: This is how
I’ll die, on a ladder in a storm at a Cornerstone show I’m here to chronicle,
electrified on the highest point in the square clutching one end of a steel
pipe while Kenny holds the other; the journey we began two years ago by
traveling the state in the back of an SUV with Michael and Larissa up front
will end with us both fried while striking the set in a storm in Rapid.
We don’t die. The scenery gets struck and brought to the
concrete floor of the bandshell until there’s a lull, and, as one, the group
decides to take advantage of the relative calm to haul the stuff to the truck
in the alley behind us. We hand the damp everything up to Ash and Maria as they
pack in as orderly a fashion as possible. And then it’s done, many hands making
lightning work of it. The rain quiets.
Mark Valdez, Cornerstone’s exuberant board chair and
artistic director of Mixed Blood in Minneapolis [Mixed Blood Theatre Company, a
professional, multiracial troupe founded to explore race through theater],
who’s been catching real-time pictures of the rainy mayhem on social media,
texts Michael to say, “At least the set isn’t made of cardboard!”
The Road to St. Francis
The next morning I will tag along for a youth workshop
Larissa and Michael have planned in Crow Creek. It’s the first of several
scheduled for the tour, a way to keep training, community-building, and
empowerment going with young people, outreach to which Larissa has been devoted
since she left the state for ballet school. It’s the kind of give-back
Cornerstone has worked to provide since its infancy too: an ongoing, possibly
lifelong relationship with places and people, not the extractive work sometimes
called “engagement”—i.e., taking stories, talent, and resources from a place
and offering a short-term, one-time return. We’ll leave at 7 a.m. and get
breakfast on the way, at Michael’s favorite place in Rapid, Black Hills
Bagels.
Around 6 p.m., I’m rewatching Stephen Ives and Michael
Kantor’s Cornerstone: An Interstate Adventure, the inspiring 1999
documentary about the company’s early days. Larissa knocks on my door. Tomorrow
morning’s workshop has been canceled without explanation.
At the kitchen sink after dinner, I talk to Brandon Sazue,
the Hunkpati Dakota actor who plays three roles in Wicoun: comic
book nerd Chris, a meth zombie, and Marcus the “Native Party Dude.” Brandon is
from Crow Creek [Indian Reservation in central South Dakota] and is a
three-time tribal chairman of the Crow Creek Sioux tribe. He speculates that
the workshop was canceled for funerals tomorrow. There have been several deaths
in that small Dakota community lately, including a teen suicide and an older
friend of Brandon’s who drank himself to death. The last time he was there, two
people he knew died in a car crash. The town tends to close down for funerals.
I think of something his cast-mate Gina Project Celebrity Mallory said about
personal loss on the drive to the Black Hills Playhouse some days before: “When
you have a large family, you have to expect it.” This whole land of Native
nations can feel like that—a large family in a state of almost continual,
expected loss.
The next youth workshop takes a more comic turn toward
cancellation. The morning after the Main Street rain-out, the company leaves
Placerville for the Rosebud Quality Inn & Casino, 200 miles away on the
western edge of Rosebud reservation. In the parking lot of the casino, you can
physically step across the Nebraska state line into Valentine. A couple days
later, Larissa, Michael, and I head to the St. Francis Indian School for
theatre games and a playwriting workshop. A large, modern K-12 campus rooted in
Lakota values and language, St. Francis was originally affiliated with the
Catholic mission where we met Harold Compton two years before [see Part 1].
Unlike on our earlier visit, in which we took a Jeep, we’re driving a Toyota
Camry—the first time in years the creative duo hasn’t had a four-wheel-drive
vehicle. We make the mistake of following Google Maps and turn off the highway
onto an unpaved road that alternates dirt with gravel, wet from storms the
night before. Then we hit sand. Not quicksand, but the kind of soft sand you
sink into, and, without the right kind of car, stay sunk.
Michael and I push while Larissa revs. Larissa and I push
while Michael rocks. Remembering lessons from the Chicago snowstorms of my
youth, I drive while they push. We find a remnant of a board and slide it under
the back tire. Still stuck. It’s hot. The closest signs of human existence are
way distant farms. We’re in full prairie. The caption of the photos will read:
“Well, at least they still have reception.”
Larissa calls AAA. She calls—and cancels till another
time—the workshop at St. Francis School. Michael calls company manager Paula,
because rehearsal for the next performance will begin in the Todd County Middle
School’s gymnasium early in the afternoon. Two-and-a-half hours later, Paula
pulls up in the kind of SUV we should have been driving. She ferries Michael to
rehearsal while Larissa and I wait for the AAA driver to finish a job in
Mission, an hour away. We chat in the blazing sun at the edge of fields of tall
grass.
These plains were always grazing land for bison, so when the
U.S. instigated slaughters of bison in the 1800s and mandated that the Natives
of the area change from hunters into farmers, it never really worked. Soon 6.5
million acres reserved by treaty for Native tribes were whittled down to 1
million acres as the government revised or ignored the treaties, gave
homesteading rights to whites, grabbed land back, broke it up, and encouraged
sale of the parcels. Very little of the checkerboard that’s left is fertile
farmland. Too sandy, maybe.
Finally, a black 4X4 approaches with a man who looks to be
about 19 years old and a small boy, maybe 6. (His brother? His son? Larissa and
I debate.) Carson attaches his tow chains and pulls us out. This time I’m at
the wheel as the Camry heaves and heaves while I accelerate in reverse. It’s
like being hauled over the craters of the moon in a plastic saucer sled. We’re
out.
Larissa hands him a flier for the show—he lives in Kyle,
near an upcoming performance—and slips him $20. “What’s this for?” he asks. She
tells him it’s just a thank-you and they should buy themselves a good meal. As
they’re leaving, the 6-year-old gives us a piece of advice. “Next time you guys
come up here, you should bring your four-wheel-drive pickup.” He glances at the
sandy, mucky car and, as if anticipating problems with the rental agency,
offers another parting shot: “You should take that to the car wash and don’t
tell anyone.”
Four-and-a-half hours after we left the Quality Inn, we
arrive at Todd County, where rehearsal is in full tilt. I’ve never been so
happy to see a middle school gym in my life.
9A Transformed
At the heart of
the story, people change. Maybe worlds can change too.
Everything crashes in on Wicoun’s lead
character, Áya. The Indians at the Blow Up the Faces Rally, a Native protest at
Mt. Rushmore, grow hungry and restive after the delivery car with free food
gets a flat. Áya is angry too, and, enraged to learn that their sibling-cousin
Khoskalaka secretly applied to a college several states away and has been
offered a “full ride,” sends him away. Crowds at the protest, played by
puppets, become violent and threaten our heroes. The Indians are turning on
each other, what comic book nerd Chris calls “this crabs in a bucket mentality.
Tearing each other down…Expecting someone to save us when we have the means to
save ourselves.”
The three superheroes Áya has previously summoned—Wóohitike
(bravery), Wówachiŋtȟaŋke (perseverance), and Wówačhaŋtognake (generosity) [see
Part 2]—aren’t enough. With Chris’s guidance, Áya calls on the fourth cardinal
virtue, Wóksape (wisdom), but no one appears. Maybe book-smart Khoskalaka can
help? Wówačhaŋtognake fetches him back at super speed, but no, Khoskalaka’s not
the answer. This virtue has to come from within Áya. Wisdom will allow Áya to
incorporate the other powers: bravery, perseverance, and, with a nudge from
Wówačhaŋtognake to be as charitable to the white folks as to the Native,
generosity. Áya can assume their powers and fulfill the quest of becoming—but
first must acquire wisdom. This means, according to historian Joseph Marshall,
“knowing what to do with what you know, when to do it, and how to do it.” Or,
in Khoskalaka’s words, as he and Áya reconcile with a little help from their
super friends, “Wisdom is honesty. The old ways. It’s harmony with all things.”
But to find this wisdom, as Chris explains, “You have to be in harmony
with you.” Khoskalaka brings the lesson home: “Be you. All of you.
No more fighting with who you are.”
[Many
American Indian societies don’t see disease as biological, physiological, or
psychological maladies, but as a reflection of disharmony in society or the
world. This is then manifested in a person’s illness. The healing
rite requires repairing this environmental disorder. The Navajo healing
ceremony, for example, includes prayers, songs or chants, sandpaintings, sweat
baths, ritual bathing, face- and body-painting, and other practices dedicated
to accomplishing this. (See my post on ROT “‘My Mind Restore For Me’:
Navajo Healing Ceremonies,” 15 May 2013.)]
Before our eyes, as Larissa writes, “Áya makes a grand
dramatic gesture to shed the female expression of themself and transitions
before our eyes to a trans man, with a little flair that holds their female
power too. It’s Clark Kent into Superman. Instant and awesome. We wonder why we
didn’t always see it.”
Áya becomes Ahí. It helps that, as we watch, Ahí is arrayed
in beautiful regalia, head to toe. From this point through the play’s final
minutes, Ahí will speak only in Lakota and Dakota, promising to use their new
powers for all of the people together, using the old to be new, and to “look
incredible while we do it.”
After the fact, it seems inevitable that 9A [nee-nuh; see
Part 2] was cast as Áya, but it wasn’t. An Oglala Lakota singer-songwriter
based on Pine Ridge Reservation, 9A has earned multiple honors from the Native
American Music Awards and more than 17,000 followers on TikTok for
her “Lakota pop.” As the creative team sorted out specific casting among the
company of actors they’d assembled, and as Larissa and Michael worked to suit
the characters to those who might play them, 9A expected to portray a
superhero. Once rehearsals began, Áya beckoned. Drawn to the idea of being a
trans actor playing a trans character, 9A fixated on the role and “somewhat
intentionally showed a bit more enthusiasm” when reading that part. I
can do it, I know I can do it, she thought. Let me show you that I
have the capability. She could and did.
Áya’s quest mirrors 9A’s in many ways, including the
deepening connection to Lakota values. She grew up in Humboldt, Iowa, where her
Lakota mother and aunt had been “adopted out” in infancy to a white Catholic
family. Fortunately, her grandparents, having traveled the world as a
missionary minister and nurse, had a greater tolerance of cultural difference
than many of the families who “scooped” children out of Native communities. In
2015, just before her 21st birthday, 9A moved back to South Dakota, where she
met a man at a construction job. He invited her to a traditional “sweat,” and
thus began a journey of discovery, post-traumatic stress healing,
self-emergence, and, with that man, a life-changing relationship.
9A’s gender transition has been a reflection in reverse, as
she transitions to a man onstage and a woman in life. The opportunity has been
powerful. Playing Áya/Ahí, she said, “gave me that opportunity to reconcile a
lot of qualms. In regards to my own gender, it made me feel a bit more content.
Even something as simple as Áya saying, ‘I don’t hate being a girl.’ It was
kind of the same thing for me; I didn’t hate having the body I have.”
Ahí’s final monologue, while feeling natural to 9A in
Lakota, is also poignant because, as the character stands as the man he’s
become, 9A experiences the moment as “part of the goodbye of owning that
[masculinity] fully in order to move on from it. As a trans person, I never
despised having a male body or hated men or anything. All I ever wanted was to
see our men be healthy and prosper and get better and work through their
stuff.”
She sums up the remarkable convergence. “It’s just sort of
beautiful how I’m reconciling my transness and figuring out being Oglala Lakota
and everything else—that I’m having this opportunity of my first paid acting
gig playing a trans lead character written by the first Native woman to get a
play on Broadway. That doesn’t feel subtle.”
I think back to the community story circle, where her answer
to the prompt “My superpower is…” was, “I feel powerful when…I just am, when
I’m me, exactly as I’m supposed to be. When I embrace myself to a T and others
match me.”
Brandon Makes History
The first performance of the state-wide tour is scheduled
for three days after the Main Square thunderstorm. The company has relocated to
the hotel and casino in Rosebud and will perform in Ft. Thompson, part of the
Crow Creek reservation, where the youth workshop had been canceled without
explanation. This is Brandon Sazue’s home, and it promises to be his big day.
The notice for Wicoun auditions leapt out
at him from the website of Sinte Gleska University. Brandon is a student, along
with his 29-year-old daughter, at Lower Brule Community College [on the Lower
Brulé Indian Reservation in Lyman and Stanley counties, central South Dakota],
an arm of Sinte Gleska. Though he’d never acted before, he thought, “I could do
this. I can do this.” He took a break from his day job as a
school janitor and, because he also drives a school bus, drove home to audition
on Zoom. He auditioned for Elder Superhero, even though, at 49, he doesn’t feel
like an elder yet. So he was happy to be cast as nerdy Chris. With his wife’s
blessing, he took the job.
He had a powerful instinct to do the play—an intuition that
it would change his life, and help him recover from several recent hellish
years that began, I later learn, at the Standing Rock protests in 2016. As
thousands of Indigenous protestors from dozens of tribal nations gathered to
halt the Dakota Access Pipeline that would deliver oil from North Dakota to
Illinois, Brandon worked the encampment, driving people everywhere, working so
hard to support the ongoing gathering that he missed seeing “all the famous
people who came.” When police violently broke the protests, he was arrested and
put into prison. “I was so broken,” he says, though he keeps details to
himself. “I did so many great, awesome things in my life. Then Standing Rock
happened and everything went to shit after that.”
The play, he explains, “is giving me my life back. Giving me
something to look forward to, to live for, something to inspire myself to say,
I can do this—just to think about something else, being in a different world.”
The night before the Crow Creek performance, we’re talking
in the room we share at the Quality Inn. He’s already told me about his
military service as a young man and being discharged early for drunkenness, a
past he’s surmounted. He doesn’t linger on his three terms as tribal chairman,
though he does say, “Politics will eat you alive.” He currently works seven
days a week at three jobs. Having been a paraprofessional in an elementary
school, he switched to being a janitor to earn 30 or 40 more cents an hour—and
then, days later, the pay scale for paraprofessionals jumped to $20 an hour,
over $4 more than he makes as a janitor. He also drives a school bus and will
soon test for a commercial license so he can drive larger buses. Weekends he
serves as a kind of dorm parent for the boarding students. On top of this, he’s
father to five children from a first marriage, including the daughter he will
graduate beside two months after the tour ends, and 4-year-old twins at home
with his second wife.
But tomorrow he’ll return to his community as an
actor. “They think of me as a janitor, but tomorrow they’ll see I’m an
actor.” He is so proud, and it’s infectious. “We’re making history. Nobody’s
ever brought theatre to the tribes like this. Ever. After we’re there and gone,
then people are going to realize: Holy shit. Of course the first
Native American woman on Broadway was there. Yeah.”
The show takes place on a grassy lot between the offices of
the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, local home to Great Plains Tribal Leaders
Health Board and the Tribal Opioid Response project, among
others, and the larger hangar-like building where Brandon spent three two-year
terms as chairman. It’s a hot day, so the audience of just under 30 people
plant their chairs in the shade alongside the office building, which means the actors
will have to skew stage left throughout. The show holds for half an hour.
(Brandon is used to folks here showing up an hour late.) The volunteers from
the Opioid Response project hand out popcorn and “Reach for Life” bags
containing flyers and wrist bands embossed with a suicide prevention hotline
number.
Brandon’s performance seems particularly strong today,
confident. The laughs on the reservation erupt at different moments than in
Rapid City and Custer. (There’s a “Rez dog” sound cue the audience loves, as
they do Wóohitike’s offer to crush the Rapid City cop who harasses Áya and
Khoskalaka.) When Brandon is onstage his twins, who turned 4 the day before,
settle and watch him, transfixed.
He and I ride back to Rosebud with Michael and Larissa that
night, stopping for dinner at Mi Pueblo in Chamberlain. From 9:30, when we
leave the restaurant, until midnight, when we arrive at the hotel, the skies
are full of the most intense lightning display I’ve ever seen: 180° of sky lit
by a constant crash of zigzag, horizontal, devil-fingered, and full-sky bursts.
Brandon claims this extreme weather is common here, but we marvel and gasp. I
watch his calm face in the storm as a way of stilling my own panic. At each
electric blast, Larissa lets out a demonic laugh, watching gleefully out the
passenger window. As the rain begins and swells, Michael pulls over, and they
switch seats.
When we reach our hotel, Brandon confesses that the
lightning storm raged on longer than any he remembers. (“It was terrifying,” I
say, still shaking.) He quietly notes that city drivers—i.e., Larissa and
Michael—drive much faster in the rain than locals would to keep from
hydroplaning. (I’d been thinking the same thing, as I watched the speedometer
in mounting dread.) None of it fazed him, though. He’s feeling great about the
day. He heads to the casino to see if his luck will hold, determined to make only
coin-sized bets. I head to bed, my stomach in vomitous knots.
Once in bed I feel drops of water on my face and realize
it’s raining into our Quality Inn room. (It’s raining into other rooms too, I
later discover, the rez franchise being low on the hotel chain’s list of
priorities.) I make my way to reception to ask for a room change and then to
the casino to let my roommate know. Brandon’s sitting at a slot machine aglow.
His great day just got greater: He just won $500 on a quarter bet. He exits
alongside me and doesn’t return to the slots all week.
This is what he says: “Bringing the theatre to Crow Creek,
to my hometown, coming back to the casino and winning $500—it just doesn’t get
any better than that. We made history.”
The Sense of an Ending
At the heart of
this story: a 10-year collaboration between a playwright and director, and the
end of an even longer collaboration between that director and an ensemble.
On that windy night at Racing Magpie, the second performance
of Wicoun, Michael John Garcés, a different kind of hero, earns his
cape. It’s a blue-and-white star quilt, really, presented in a surprise
ceremony before the second show begins. Larissa, Kenny, and Clementine drape it
over his shoulders in recognition of all the work he’s done to give theatrical
voice to the Indigenous people of the U.S. This tour, this show, will be
Michael’s final production as artistic director of Cornerstone, 17 years
after he took the job. Two weeks after the tour ends, he will step down.
Michael’s quilt was commissioned from Gladys Thunder
Hawk-Gay, a local artist and grandmother of design consultant Tosa Two Heart.
Coincidentally, the colors match the star quilt Larissa has at home. It’s not
surprising. There’s a striking symbiosis in their relationship, a collaboration
of a decade that has extended beyond the trilogy to productions of Larissa’s
other plays at regional theatres, including one scheduled for the Guthrie
in Minneapolis and one at L.A.’s Center Theater Group. (This latter show
gets canceled, along with the entire season at CTG’s Mark Taper Forum,
just as Wicoun concludes.) They’ve also both been appointed as
professors of practice at ASU [Arizona State University; see Part 2] for the
coming year.
Long-term playwright-director collaborations develop their
own brand of intimacy and openness. Add to that tens of thousands of miles on
the road, in shared community and housing, navigating perpetually new
circumstances, and you have a constant conversation-in-progress. “Some spoken
and some not,” Michael says. “We work together pretty instinctually at this
point.” What he calls the “fluidity” of their collaboration means “we don’t
really define the separation between church and state, between writer and director
quite so concretely.” The credit on Wicoun, as on the other two
projects, reads “By Larissa FastHorse In Collaboration with Michael John
Garcés.”
What started with Michael as artistic director, then
director of her work—he directed all three of her Native projects with
Cornerstone, though he wasn’t originally slated to do so—became a process and
partnership that “just keeps growing and deepening as we go,” according to
Larissa. It also keeps changing. By way of example, she jokes, “I found out
that he can type 10 times faster than me. He hid that from me for many years.
Now he gets to do the typing.” They are currently writing things together.
Through miles and hours in cars, stockpiling favorite candy
and sharing meals on the fly, listening to rock ’n’ roll of different eras,
replaying inside jokes, disparaging each other’s musical tastes, their
relationship emanates the snarky, loving codependence of brilliant siblings
forced to share a bathroom well into their 50s. They know each other too well.
When Michael struggles to describe the “particular feeling”
of coming to the end of his time leading Cornerstone, Larissa offers a word:
“Poignancy?”
“Yeah, poignancy,” Michael responds. “It feels emblematic of
my tenure at Cornerstone to be doing my last project in South Dakota, a project
that virtually nobody in L.A. will ever see. And yet the methodology is at its
purest, and also the commitment to mission is at its purest.”
Why is it emblematic to do the final show where people in
L.A., Cornerstone’s home base since 1994, won’t see it?
“It’s just not an L.A. show,” Michael says. “I didn’t go to
Cornerstone to further my career. I had a career. It wasn’t a steppingstone to
something else. My time at Cornerstone has been about deepening connection to
community.”
Larissa elaborates: “This is only going to be for a few
weeks. Except for a couple of friends, the only people going to see this are
actual community members. Peter’s been talking about how this is the most
Cornerstone work Cornerstone is doing. It’s not trying to be anything but
community-serving. This is the stuff that makes me the happiest. It fulfills me
the most. Also I feel like it’s actually doing some kind of real good in the
world—as much as you can with theatre.”
There has been, for Michael, the “sense of an ending”
with Wicoun, and “moments of surprising emotion in saying goodbye
to the ensemble as an ensemble member.” Still, a lifetime in
theatre, building “an emotional framework” to deal with “having short-term,
intense relationships in collaborations on- and offstage and then moving on to
the next one,” has taught him how to say goodbye. It has also taught him to
focus on the work ahead. “There’ve been a lot of beginnings in my life lately.
I got married in September, and I became a grandfather recently. I’ll be
writing another play for Cornerstone in Portland, though not as artistic
director. I feel like I’ve accomplished what I wanted to. If I could have known
coming in that my tenure would have been this, I would have felt
pretty fucking happy about it.”
Larissa, on the other hand, doesn’t know if, after these three
projects, she’ll be invited to work with Cornerstone again. She’s not an
ensemble member, and the future direction of the company will depend on the
next artistic director. Michael’s departure, however, won’t affect their
ongoing work. Their engagement in South Dakota will also continue, including,
they hope (and plan to fundraise for) a return of Wicoun. To that
end they have stored all the scenery and puppets.
“I talk to Cornerstone folks and realize they’re having a
different moment than he and I are,” she says. “We’ve got a lot more work to do
this year and next, and we’re continuing in South Dakota, so it’s part of a
continuum for the two of us. In terms of collaborating together, it doesn’t
feel like the ending of anything.”
Contrast this with Kenny Ramos, who has figuratively and
often literally been along for the 10-year ride with Larissa and Michael. As
part of the American Indian Community Council of Los Angeles, Kenny first
met Larissa and the Cornerstones at a Council meeting and later in the week
joined a story circle that would lead to Urban Rez. Disenfranchised
by a “racist American theatre,” he had stopped acting and managed a program
called Retention of American Indians Now! (RAIN! for short) at his alma mater,
UCLA. Soon he was working as a community partner and then as an actor in the
show. Ensemble membership in Cornerstone followed, while making Native
Nation. He has since been a major connector in each new Native
community, a kind of pan-tribal matchmaker, finding friends or friends of
friends everywhere they go, bringing more and more Native people into their
orbit. “Now I’m like, ‘Wait, Mom and Dad are leaving?’”
He’s excited to see what the company’s next chapter is, but
he’s especially “passionate about the work in Indigenous communities, which has
been very specifically with Michael and Larissa,” he notes. “As challenging as
this is, touring around South Dakota, I would love to do this in all kinds of
tribal communities. Let’s go to all the villages in Alaska. How crazy and hard
would that be? Can we fit it all on a little plane and, oh my God, do it in
winter? Can our cardboard sets last on ice?”
For Kenny the “good” Larissa speaks of them doing with
theatre lives in the realm of “sovereign justice. People talk about social
justice a lot,” he says, “and I think with American Indians it’s different. Our
sovereignty is at the center of how our communities operate and also at the
center of how our communities experience what it is to live in the United
States, a nation-to-nation relationship.” Sovereign justice, then, is “all
about our ability to govern ourselves, to determine our futures, to create nations
that thrive, that are centered on our values.” What will the future of this
work be for him as an actor-activist now that Mom and Dad are moving on?
When I ask Michael and Larissa the question they’ve asked
hundreds of others—what is your superpower? —Michael, in the front passenger
seat, grows mum. The silence stretches on. I threaten, “I know you guys don’t
want me to write, ‘They ask people questions they’re unwilling to answer
themselves.’”
Michael says, “One of my superpowers is my intransigence.”
Larissa leaps in: “His ability to make endless jokes out of
poor grammar,” adding, “I was naming his superpower. My superpower is
describing Michael’s superpower.”
“He has better ones,” she says, getting real. “It’s
beautiful to watch how you uplift people and they don’t know it.”
If 9A’s comments are any indication, others do know
how much Michael does. “What I’ve loved about Michael is that he’s put an
effort to actually show he cares,” 9A tells me. “It’s cool to see, especially
from somebody on the outside of my community. Just being fully cognizant of how
much trauma there is, but also of what we can do and our own resilience when
our backs are against the wall.”
What makes Michael feel powerful? His jaw clenches and he
crosses his arms. He looks out the window.
An antelope runs in front of the car, and we wait.
Michael speaks: “I’ve spent the last 17 years at Cornerstone
getting away from the paradigm of feeling powerful. I’m a six-foot tall,
straight, white-presenting dude in the United States. I came to Cornerstone
because I was sick of the power dynamics in rehearsal rooms and bored with it.
I try to do a lot to shift the power dynamics of any creative situations I’m
in.
“That’s why we have an ensemble, right?” he continues. “And
that’s why we do the work in this way. You don’t come to South Dakota to do a
play with community to feel powerful, honestly. There is feeling powerful when
you are part of a collective of people doing a project because they want to do
it. That is a very powerful feeling, of collectivity in power. You can be a
conduit to doing something beautiful.”
Larissa elaborates. “When you and I are standing backstage
in the dark somewhere, and the community is out there, and they don’t need us
anymore—I guess that’s what I would call powerful. That’s when I feel good,
when we’re not needed anymore. When they are telling their stories and their
strength and their passion and their way and their confidence, and we are
forgotten somewhere in the dark in the back. Really, that’s the best moment. We
could just walk away and they wouldn’t ever notice.” In other words, the
greatest superhero is the one who can walk away, while those who remain have
the power to save themselves.
Summer 2023
The tour ends on June 16 at the Cheyenne River Youth
Project Art Park in Eagle Butte. There are too many stories to print here.
Some I witnessed, like the night Michael, Kenny, Larissa and I stopped in at
the bar outside our motel in Kennebec and a woman, hearing the name FastHorse,
introduced herself and revealed she used to live with Larissa’s grandfather;
she’d had two children with him.
Or stories I heard: how kindly Peter Howard spent 15 minutes
in a police car outside Wagner in 5° weather, getting background checked on the
suspicion that, like his character, he was running drugs or human trafficking,
a problem with white outsiders in rental cars in this region. He told the
officer about community-engaged theatre, discovered they shared a birthday, and
got released with a warning for driving (a little) too fast.
And of course all the stories of the performances and the
people who came to see them, the people who almost auditioned, then backed out,
or who auditioned and couldn’t do the play because this or that happened.
Stories of how the actors felt at each new destination, especially, like
Brandon, when they played at home. Christopher Alexander Piña, whose Lakota
name is Generous, said that everyone has a story and is one.
So many stories converge in this work, each needing to be told.
Larissa, whose superpower is “seeming trustworthy,” knows
this in her writerly bones. “For some reason people feel the need to tell me
their life story,” she muses. “People on the bus, people in the store.” This
attentive approachability is very useful in her work. Though she’s an
introvert, she’s able to talk to strangers and inspire them to “tell me very
long, very intimate stories about themselves. I’m very honored that they do.”
Because she actually is trustworthy, she in turn feels “a lot of responsibility
in holding these stories.”
In an email to the company, she tries to express “how
emotional it makes me to hear Lakota being spoken every day while standing
under Lakota paintings and wearing Lakota clothes on L/Dakota actors. It’s a
dream I’ve had for a very long time. Wopila for making it come true—not for me,
but for all L/Dakota people who are invisible or feared or persecuted or
struggling or successful on our homelands. Wopila for helping us be seen. It’s
the best of what art, and especially Cornerstone, can do.” [Wopila is a
Lakota expression of gratitude for all that life has to offer, for all of
existence, and the blessings inherent in each moment.]
I left before the tour ended, so I ask her about the parts I
missed. There’s so much more than she can put in an email: All the people who
wanted the company to stay longer or come to their town, the show with 12 dogs,
how “bizarre and special” it was to play in her hometown “with people from all
parts of my life in one place.” 9A already landed her next acting gig, as Danny
in Bear Grease [Indigenous take on the classic 1971 musical Grease
by Crystle Lightning and Henry “Cloud” Andrade]. “I wish you
could have been there for all of the kids,” she writes. “They are the most
amazing part of this.”
Children have been central to Larissa’s lifelong project
from the days when she came back, barely out of high school, to lead dance and
writing classes, to the recent summers at Lakota Youth Development [Herrick, S.D.;
mission: “Reclaiming Lakota language, culture and spirituality by promoting
education and healthy lifestyles for our youth through culturally based
strategies”]. In June, she helped arrange a New York trip for the kids from LYD
to see The Thanksgiving Play on Broadway, where they met with
the cast, attended & Juliet, and toured city sights. They not
only saw the city for the first time; they saw the first play by one of their
own, a Lakota woman—someone they know—on Broadway.
Running parallel to Wicoun, Larissa and Michael
scheduled as many youth workshops as possible at stops along the way. Some
never happened, as in Crow Creek, or had to be scaled back after, for example,
a car got stuck in the prairie sand. Each was, as Michael puts it, “its own very
particular adventure.” Originally, as Tony Awards season [11 June 2023; nominations
announced: 2 May] approached, it seemed likely that Michael would be leading
these alone, so that Larissa could be in New York. When The
Thanksgiving Play went inexplicably unnominated, it meant that Larissa
would not only be present at all the tour shows, but that she could join
Michael and the kids. At a May staff huddle, she quipped: “The upside of not
getting a Tony is that I can now force 7-year-olds to write plays.”
They create a show with LYD early in rehearsals, Learning
Wolakota—another superhero piece with a lot of Milks Camp history in it. [Wolakota
means peace, balance, and coming together. It is the traditional way of life
and culture of the Lakota people] They have the concept for another short play,
a template to be workshopped briefly in visits to some of the tour spots. They
will have the children insert their own stories and perform it as a staged
reading. Ultimately it’s presented only at Marty Indian School on the Yankton
Reservation ([easternmost 60% of Charles Mix County, southeastern South Dakota]
also a future performance site), thanks in large part to Dakota elder Faith
Spotted Eagle, and in Eagle Butte before Wicoun.
In Rapid City the night of the rainstorm, Larissa talks to a
little boy who is tearing around Main Street Square on his Razor scooter. She
invites him to the play, telling him it’s about Lakota people.
“I mean, his face—just the concept of it happening in his
town was incredible,” she recounts. “But I’m Lakota!” she says he cried. “He
was not a child who had the capacity to sit still and watch something, but he
couldn’t leave until the rain drove us all away. Seeing his face and the way it
lit up, and seeing that again and again in the shows we’ve done for Lakota
people, because of the incredible invisibility we have here—invisible in plain
sight—it’s really beautiful. A little person who does not even understand what
a play is, but couldn’t leave because it was about Lakota people and that’s who
he is.”
The children have always been at the heart of this project,
this story. They are the heart because they are the future: the
camp kids emerging from their hoodies to run around as prairie chickens who are
really ducks, the little girl at Racing Magpie laughing at “No sugar!” while
waiting for her permanent teeth, the LYD kids at a Broadway play by their own
teacher, the boy on the Razor.
The name of the play Larissa and Michael dream up for the
youth workshops? The Further Adventures of Ahí.
[This
completes Todd London’s chronicle of the development and production of Larissa
FastHorse’s Wicoun. I’ve decided to compile a short biographical
sketch of playwright FastHorse to introduce her to ROTters. I’m also going to put together a short history
of Native American theater, which, as I said in my introduction to the first installment
of London’s report, I think is “a remarkable cultural phenomenon.”
[I
plan to have the supplement to “‘Superheroes’” ready for posting by Tuesday, 30
January. If I don’t make that deadline,
it will appear on Rick On Theater on Tuesday, 6 February. (Another post will run on 1 February—not 30 January—if
I don’t keep my schedule.)]
