It’s been one heck of a week, and what a productive way to cap it off! This afternoon Darci, Chris and I worked through the Makataimeshkiakiak, or Black Hawk, scene. I’m trying to refer to him by his name in Sauk. It seems more respectful.
Darci had to get there late today, so Chris and I read through the scene several times just getting the feel for it. Several textual changes were in order, but the blocking flowed pretty naturally out of it.
When Darci arrived, she watched the scene. Her note was, “It’ll be interesting to see how it works with Ranae in it.” In this scene, the Schoolteacher is trying to give a lesson while Makataimeshkiakiak and Pihnêefich have their jailhouse scene. The gist is supposed to be competing storytelling. But Ranae couldn’t be with us today, so I asked Darci to step in and read her part. I wasn’t sure it was working, but after talking to Darci and Chris when we were done, I’m convinced that the competing storytelling will work as compelling theater. But we’ll find out for sure when we plug Ranae in on Wednesday.
Now it’s time to rest up. I feel the start of a sore throat coming on.
Today it was just Ranae and me. Torrential weather outside, so perfect weather for telling the story of the Wounded Knee Massacre inside.
The “Wounded Knee Sequence,” as I’m calling it, is really Ranae’s scene, where her character has regained power in the play, and is regaining momentum. The process with all of these lesson plans seems to be to get her comfortable enough telling the story that she can put it into her body. Once she gets to that point she’s really an engaging storyteller.
After we got that sequence up to speed, I had her do all of her lesson plans in sequence without interruptions. The only transition that was tenuous is the one between the stealing of Indian children and the Ghost Dance. That tells me that the Ghost Dance lesson plan is a direct reaction to the Pihnêefich/Messiah scene.
I finally made it to my friend Kestryl Cael Lowrey’s show! I missed hir earlier 348, but I’m glad I made it to Radclyffe. It was playing at the Theatre Workshop on 36th St. as part of the Fresh Fruits Autumn Festival. “Fresh Fruits” is actually a pun, because it’s a festival of plays by queer artists.
Kestryl and I went to Lewis and Clark together, and ze was a year ahead of me in the theater department. Kestryl is transgender, and seems to have always been interested in queer theater. Back college, ze used the masculine pronouns for hirself, but now it seems like ze’s using “ze” and “hir.” This is my little disclaimer to say that I’m not totally familiar with these words, so let me know if I get one of them wrong.
So Radclyffe. Radclyffe Hall was an “invert,” or butch writer in the earlier 20th Century. Kestryl’s one-person show is a meditation on Radclyffe’s life and its lessons for queer culture today. The show, as it stands, is definitely geared towards a queer audience. However, it seems to me to be a first draft of something bigger, and, if I may, more important. Radclyffe’s life goal, as presented by Kestryl, was to communicate lesbian life as it is unashamedly to the mainstream. She had to compromise this goal because of the times she lived in: she felt, according to Kestryl, that the only way to do this was to make the lesbian protagonist miserable. Hence the title of her book, The Well of Loneliness. Kestryl is pushing for Radclyffe’s original concept, in which the protagonist is happy, leads a fulfilling life, and nobody has a problem with it.
Radclyffe the play is the first draft of that. But the burden, it seems to me, isn’t on the queer community. It’s on the mainstream. After all, for all their political activism, Kestryl and hir compatriots can’t force anybody to accept them. It has to come from us. In a later draft of this play, I’d like to see it done for an audience of more than ten, in which more than 10% is part of the mainstream. And that we’re there because we want to be there, not because it makes us feel like a bigger person. That’s a terrible reason. The good reasons are things like: it’s a fun thing to do, to support your friends, because you’re curious about who, exactly, Radclyffe Hall is. You know, all the reasons I went. So I guess the burden on the mainstream is to be more like me.
Last night’s rehearsal was smooth sailing. The only troublesome part was hashing out how the songs towards the end are going to work, and the only change I had to make to the script was actually an un-scripting of the car-chase scene. Just like I’ve been creating structures for Ranae to riff on as the Schoolteacher, and for me when I tell the story at the end, I let the words I wrote for the car-chase go, and just riffed on the high points. This allows me to have a much more organic, even flirtatious, relationship with the audience.
The transition songs between the Battle of Kekionga and the final story troubled me at first, because I just wasn’t feeling it as an organic transition. So we tried a thing or two, tweaked this and that, and ended up pretty much with the structure I’d written, with only the minor change of having Ranae sit after she starts singing. My singing, while it felt unmotivated when we started rehearsing it, seems to derive organically from the tension that Ranae and I create in the Battle of Kekionga. The songs do provide the atmospheric bridge that I need between the Battle and the final story.
All in all, I’m pleased with the direction Coyote Hunts the Sun is headed, and I’m especially confident with this final sequence that we rehearsed last night.
Last night we finished the second week of rehearsals with the Ghost Dance sequence. As a playwright, director and actor, I’m excited with how this scene is shaping up, especially since it’s descended from the first scene I wrote for this play. From a storyteller’s perspective, however, I’m concerned with how much I’m leaving out.
In this scene, Pihnêefich confronts the Ghost Dance Messiah, and begins to take control of the story away from the Schoolteacher. Ranae Hedman, who is playing the schoolteacher, is doing fabulously. She’s one of those awesome actors who have a penchant for research, and she came in knowing more about California Indian slavery than I do. She knows the stories better than she thinks she does, and so our process with her is just to get her out of her own head.
The confrontation really works. I hadn’t blocked it out before-hand: I wanted Chris Petty and me to do it and see what happened organically. With my assistant director Darci Faye’s help, we created a tense standoff between two vicious predators. Pihnêefich is, after all, Coyote, and there’s nothing lamblike about this Messiah!
And that’s where I feel I’m not doing the Ghost Dance story justice. I don’t think Wovoka was a bad person, and I think most of the Ghost Dancers did it with their hearts in the right place. After reading Mooney’s The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, the seminal book on the Ghost Dance, it became clear to me that the tribes that really took to it had seen their religions decimated, and perhaps had already been pushed from their homelands. It’s easy for me, a 21st century Karuk, to say they should have stuck with their own religions, but in too many cases that was impossible. Do I think they would have been better off if they had? Absolutely, and I take that stance strongly in Coyote Hunts the Sun. Do I appreciate that they were doing the best that they could? Yes, I do, but I’m concerned that that part of the story does not come out in my play.
This past Thursday night I attended a “Theater of Place” workshop with Gerard Stropnicky of the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble. Talk about an inspirational evening!
First, what is “Theater of Place?” It’s a theater piece intimately rooted in a specific geographic location. What Gerard and his playwright collaborator Jo Carson do is travel to rural communities in the U.S. where they develop plays with the community based on community stories, very frequently stories of communal trauma such as a long-since-passed child-molester, or lynchings in the South. Gerard’s workshop gave us a taste of how they collect and develop these stories:
After we did a big warm-up to get everybody laughing, he split us into pairs and “pods” of pairs. In each pair we told each other a story about a time that we, personally, felt supported. Then, we told the story back to the original teller in the first person. We picked one of these stories to present to our pod, and then the pod as a whole picked one of the stories to tell to the whole workshop. Then we had 10 minutes to turn it into a little skit.
Afterwards, he read us a transcript of one of the stories he and Jo have gathered in their professional work. It dealt with childhood sex-abuse. He only shared one transcript with us, but apparently they’d gotten the same story from 5 different women in this community. Then we read the script that they developed from these stories for the community to perform as a way to confront and hopefully begin to heal from this social wound.
What did I learn? First, I was reminded of the importance of improvisation and allowing the group to work semi-democratically to devise a way to enact stories. I was reminded of the importance of warm-ups to get the group laughing together. And I was inspired to bring some of these techniques (or versions of them) home to the River with me to help tell our stories with my People.
Cops make me nervous on the best of days. After too many stories of them picking on Indians and blacks because they can, or my dad because of his long hair and beard back in his Coos Bay days, I know that they can do whatever they want to you. As sick as it makes me to say it, cops are above the law. But I was especially nervous heading in to occupy Times Square on October 15th. I’d seen videos on YouTube that morning of cops running over peaceful protesters and clocking a girl in the face on Wall Street on Friday morning. And when I saw all the blue and white and their metal barricades assembled around Times Square, I felt afraid. Welcome to the America the rest of us live in, white part of the 99%!
I have to give the men and women in blue and white their due, though. They were respectful and acted like civilized human beings during the first part of the protest. When the marchers from WashingtonSquarePark arrived, Times Square filled up with signs and chants for a chance in our American economy. Where my friend and I stood, under the Stars and Stripes between 46th and 47th, a brass band played, and dancers in formal wear and stilts danced. It was a beautiful feeling to be there. While they danced, organizers came around and passed out sparklers and candles. When dusk came, we lit them and sang “This Little Light of Mine.” I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I’m including a link to my video of it. Please excuse my monotone: I don’t really know that song.
If you watch the second video, I don't sing as loud, so it sounds nicer. Then we did a speech using what I think is called the “human microphone.” The speaker shouts out a phrase, then the group nearest her or him shouts it behind them, then the next group shouts it behind them, and so on and so forth. This is to facilitate a more democratic style of public speaking: where one or a few people have a microphone or a bullhorn, they can monopolize the discourse. After the speech, about 6:30, Amy and I left to grab dinner: we were hungry, and she had to grade. Darn grades, they get in the way of everything.
After dinner, about 7:30, we headed back to the Square, me to check it out some more, and Amy to catch the subway. The cops had it locked down. Here’s a video of some of the bad parts that were thankfully away from where Amy and I were standing:
I couldn’t get through the Square, so I cut out to 6th Ave. The cops were there in force, too. And there were some protesters, but not for long. The boys and girls in blue moved us on out. I heard a rumor that they were authorized to use tear gas. Whatever it takes to protect the rich, I suppose. On the train ride home, I saw on Twitter that there was a standoff happening at WashingtonSquarePark. Earlier in the day, NYPD arrested a group of people closing out their accounts at Citibank. Interesting fact, on October 3, JP Morgan Chase gave the New York Police Foundation $4.6 million. Have a look:
What do I want this morning in regards to the events of yesterday afternoon and evening? Well, first, I want the cops to stop acting like little piggies protecting the big fat hogs, but I always want that. What I want that’s probably a more realizable goal is to see a bigger Indian presence! I saw on Facebook that my Mohawk colleague Maxton Scott was representing in LA, and I was out yesterday with my Karuk sign. But nobody there seems to know what to make of Indian activism in the Occupy Movement, let alone what “Karuk” means. In The Occupied Wall Street Journal, the writers compare OWS to other activist movements, but the Indian activism of the ‘60s, 70s, and early 80s is notably absent. There is a lone quote by the New York City General Assembly’s People of Color that has a lone reference to “indigenous people” buried somewhere between black and “diversity.”
If anybody needs this Movement, or one like it, it’s us Indians!
The Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis has just published a short anthology of plays for young people. Each of the plays has been recently produced by CTC, and all share certain qualities that paint an interesting picture of the issues that today’s American youth face.
All four of the plays deal with the sometimes charged relationships between ethnic groups, and with parental absence. Larissa Fasthorse’s Average Family is composite of historic Native/Euro-American relations phrased in a way to which today’s non-indigenous youth can hopefully relate. Two families, an assimilated Indian one (with minimal family cohesion) and a redneck one (who are their own little militia), are pitted against each other on a reality show.A ten-year-old Russian-American girl searches her multi-cultural apartment building for a pen in Melissa James Gibson’s Brooklyn Bridge, all while negotiating her emotionally complicated relationship to her mother who is always at work. In Lynn Alvarez’s Esperanza Rising, a twelve-year-old Mexican girl leaves her mother to work in California in the 1930s, where she takes a passive role in the fledgling labor movement and experiences first-hand anti-Latino bigotry. And an African-American mother and daughter take in a Somali refugee in Kia Corthron’s Snapshot Silhouette. All of these plays are written by adults, so their representativeness of the concerns of today’s youth is questionable, but if they are good representations, then they bring up two compelling issues. They would indicate that today’s youth are actively negotiating an increasingly multi-cultural world (which makes sense), and that they are troubled by a notable absence of parents caused by a priority of work over family, or by broken families period.
What do I make of these plays? I find BrooklynBridge to be the most compelling. Gibson’s lyricism and poignant humor tell the story of multi-culturalism and parental absence in America with a force that none of the others seem to be able to muster. Average Family is moving on the page, but I wonder how it plays. The concept seems contrived and execution heavy-handed, but perhaps that’s an effective way to tell this story to non-indigenous youth. Even if it works, the happy ending tells a false story. As much as we are getting back now in our Native Renaissance, we Indians haven’t had any clear and decisive victories. To have the redneck Monroes win the reality show would not only be accurate, but it would be troubling. And kids need to know that the good guys don’t always win, and that there’s nothing fair about warfare in general and certainly nothing fair about Indian/Euro-American wars in particular. Esperanza Rising is a competent and theatrical play, but one that I find non-remarkable. It seems that Alvarez has sprawling ambitions with this story, and there’s so much that it could be: it could be a melodrama, a portrait of a historical moment, a love story between Miguel and Esperanza, a coming of age story, a celebration of a mother’s love, or a political portrait of American oppression of Latino immigrants. It starts to be all of these things, but finishes the job with none of them. Snapshot Silhouette is well-written and exciting, but the scenic details that Corthron writes makes it seem like it almost wants to be a movie instead of a play. More importantly, I don’t buy the Somali protagonist Najma’s eloquence in English. I buy that she is in intelligent girl, and eloquent in languages she speaks, but she is the only student in the ESL class who doesn’t seem to need to be there. If that’s intentional on Corthron’s part, then she needs to further with it and actually make the point. If not, she needs to tone back Najma’s mastery of English. And yet, so much of the play rides on Najma’s lines, to do so would slow the story down. Either way it’s a loss.
Is The Face of America an interesting anthology that asks significant questions about today’s youth? Certainly. Is it rife with plays that I would want to see, or perhaps produce? No. BrooklynBridge is a stand-alone tour de force sandwiched between three perhaps unfinished plays.
