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.
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