Manahatta
Mary Kathryn Nagle
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| Steven Flores & Tanis Parenteau |
Two American stories, four centuries apart, interlock in
their telling, with characters, events, motives, triumphs, and tragedies
strikingly similar in Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Manahatta. Now in an engrossing, enlightening, and
emotional world premiere at the 2018 Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Manahatta links the lives of a modern,
Native American family of the Lenape nation from Oklahoma with their ancestors
who once lived on the island Manahatta, now known as Manhattan. Director Lurie Woolery pieces their stories
seamlessly in a continuous flow between geographies and eras as a cast of seven
themselves switch from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries and back
again, seemingly without a breath in between.
The parallels of family dynamics and dilemmas as well as the false
promises and deep prejudices they face are astonishingly similar, leaving the
very real question hanging in the air of how much has truly changed when in
fact, everything has changed.
 |
| Tanis Parenteau |
Jane -- a recent Stanford MBA graduate and gifted in
financial mathematics -- is about to join the high-flying, manic-paced world of
investment banking in Manhattan as a new hire of the prestigious Lehman
Brothers. She is leaving behind in
Oklahoma a mother, Bobbie -- an elder in the present-day Lenape tribe of the Native
American, Delaware Nation -- as well as a sister, Debra, also a Lenape woman
and member of the Delaware Nation. As
Jane begins to rip her way through the dog-eat-dog, male-oriented world of
derivatives, her relationship becomes distant and strained with her family, who
believe she is leaving too far behind her ancestral traditions and
beliefs.
 |
| Tanis Parenteau, Jeffrey King & Danforth Comins |
On the same, protruding stage of sand-colored wood where
Scenic Designer Mariana Sanchez has placed a modern desk and leather chairs,
she has also scattered implanted, huge rocks surrounded by pebbles and
dirt. Overlooking the entire setting is
a massive back-wall where we at first see a forest-and-field panorama with a
ripped section where one Native American man watches the stage. To the side, another peeled-out frame pictures
a Native American woman. That same wall magically
transforms into muted scenes of modern Oklahoma or of New York through the
exceptional projections of Elizabeth Frankel and Leslie Ishii. Those modern scenes serenely melt into the
landscape of an island once known to its peoples as Manahatta at the time in
the early 1600s when the Dutch West Indies Company was just arriving to a land
populated only by native Lenape families.
 |
| Steven Flores & Tanis Parenteau |
On this multi-serving stage, actors quickly switch to
introduce us to another family -- a young Le-le-wá-yo, her sister
Toosh-ki-pa-kwis-i, and her Mother, who is a revered and wise elder of the
Lenape. Se-ket-tu-may-qua is a young
Lenape man who loves Le-le-wá-you and who has learned to speak the tongue of
the invading Dutch in order to trade furs with them. Le-le-wá-you herself is ambitious, daring,
and full of curiosity. She convinces her
male companion to teach her the white man’s strange tongue -- a learning
session that is one of the most beautifully crafted scenes of the entire play,
taking place on top of the modern office desk.
Le-le-wá-you too begins trading and bringing home much wampum to help
provide for her sister and mother, both of whom are skeptical of her new
ventures and of the white men.
As Jane’s career soars through a crazy rollercoaster course,
Le-le-wá-you’s life too becomes more exciting as she gains more confidence in
her newly discovered skills of language and trade. Conflicts with both their more traditional
families occur while each also has a young man who supports her groundbreaking
career and who shows feelings of affection for her as a woman. Into each young woman’s life, ruthless,
money-hungry, white men exert pressures and challenges. And into each world, a major,
earth-shattering shift occurs.
 |
| Jeffrey King, Tanis Parenteau & Sheila Tousey |
For Le-le-wá-you, the cataclysmic shift comes when the Dutch
trick her family and Se-ket-tu-may-qua to sell them Manahatta for a few
trinkets and guns, with the Lenape people not understanding the concepts of
ownership or the sale of land since in their tradition, the land is their home
and not their property. With that sale
comes the new rights of the Dutch to force taxes on all the fur trades, with a soon-realized
threat by the Dutch of killing those Lenape who refuse to pay. The tragic result is that continued life as
it has been for generations on their ancestral homeland is now impossible for
Le-le-wá-you and her family.
Parallel in the storytelling, the 2008 financial collapse in
the subprime mortgage market burns a flaming path right into the pristine
offices of Lehman Brothers and Jane’s once-meteoric career. At the same time, an adjustable mortgage her
Oklahoma mother has taken out to pay for a surgery of her now deceased father
has soared with increasing interest to the point she can no longer pay, leaving
the home of her mother’s grandparents at the grave risk of losing.
What is more striking in the two, unfolding stories than
just the similarities of events and family dynamics are the attitudes and
prejudices that we see born four hundred years ago and still playing out in our
own world. Phrases by the Dutch of “they
all look alike” or of a modern white man in New York letting slip “just off the
reservation” reveal similar, inbred prejudices of those people much more native
to the Americas than the speakers. When
we see the Director of the Dutch West India Company as he tries to close the
sale of Manahatta offer the Lenape family their first sips of brandy (promising
“one of the greatest spirits we have”), we can only think of the lingering
issues of alcoholism that so many Native America communities still suffer and
the cheating promises that have made by white, greedy businessmen during the
subsequent centuries. Throughout the two
stories, such startling and sad mirroring of attitudes occurs – including an
expensive wall advocated by the Governor and then built in Manahatta to keep the
Lenape away from the Dutch (i.e., the same wall of Jane’s Wall Street).
To a person, the ensemble relating both tales is exceptional
in portraying the persona of both eras.
Tanis Parenteau is strikingly bold, inventive, and intelligent as both
Jane and Le-le-wá-you. Like her fellow actors,
her spoken tone, command of language, and general demeanor do not change as she
shifts characters and eras, making the clear point that the young, Lenape woman
of the 1600s has the same innate abilities and wherewithal of the one in the
2000s – a concept foreign to all those invading Europeans who for hundreds of
years would see the Native Americans as inferior in intelligence, morals, and
conduct.
As the mother of both scenarios, Sheila Tousey is especially
powerful and thus memorable past the final curtain call. There is a depth to her soul and wisdom in
both matriarchs. When either speaks, one
wants to lean forth and not miss one word.
The wry wit of Bobbie is particularly wonderful as she shocks a bit her
visiting banker/pastor, Jonas (David Kelly), with one-liners like, “We Lenape
don’t drink tea (because if) we drink too much tea, we drown in our
teepee.”
Rainbow Dickerson is the second sister/daughter
in both scenarios who is more conservative and cautious as well as honoring
native traditions than her sibling but who also shows tenacity and tenderness
in helping her family through tough times.
While Manahatta is
to a large extent about two core families of women, it is the men surrounding
them who offer great contrasts of honoring them or using/abusing them to the
men’s capitalistic, self-centered interests.
Steven Flores is the caring, supportive companion/mate of Le-le-wá-you as
well as Jane’s close friend, Luke -- and maybe possible mate someday -- bearing
those same, selfless characteristics.
His portrayals are in great contrasts to the men Jeffrey King portrays: The cynical, demanding, ruthless egomaniac
CEO of Lehman Brothers, Dick Fuld, and the equally greedy Director of the Dutch
West India Company, Peter Minuit. As also
Peter Stuyvesant, Dutch Governor of the now New Amsterdam Jeffrey King becomes the
vicious perpetrator of murdering entire Lenape families (and of creating the
term ‘red skin’ as the proof needed for settlers to attain bounty for killing
the hated natives). While he does not
murder people, Mr. King’s Dick Fuld also watches lives ruined around him,
readily willing to sacrifice whomever he must as soon as they are not helping
his bottom-line.
Danforth Comins serves as a kind of go-between in both
stories, showing, for example, some fascination and compassion as the Dutch fur
trader Jakob for the Lenape while also helping Peter Minuit dupe them into
selling their homeland. As the CFO of
Lehman’s, Joe -- who hires and initially manages Jane -- Mr. Comins has his
moments of Wall Street bloodthirstiness; but he also has moments of camaraderie
and compassion for the talents that Jane so ably begins to show.
The costumes that E.B. Brooks has so imaginatively created
quickly transform from one era to the next; but as the stories progress and
meld, some of the created wear begins to serve both stories equally well. The lighting of James F. Ingalls shifts
beautifully the mostly barren stage from modern offices and home to pre-colonist
outdoors and abode, with the hues of daytime skies and nights blending
especially beautifully into the panoramic, backdrop wall described earlier. The music composed and rendered in sound
design by Paul James Prendergast pays homage to the Lenape traditions while the
harsher interruptions of modern-day sounds offer notable contrasts.
Manahatta bears
little resemblance to the normal fare on a modern, theatrical stage. There is a kind of flow in the dual
storytelling along with a deep and obvious respect for ancestors and ancestral
traditions that the Native American playwright has instilled in her work that
is different in feel, emotion, and theme than we Americans normally see. As a world premiere, one can only hope that Manahatta has long legs and sees many
more follow-up productions across the nation, inspiring more stories of
families and untold history to make their way into our national, shared story.
Rating: 5 E
Manahatta continues
through October 27, 2018 at the Thomas Theatre at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Tickets are
available at https://www.osfashland.org/on-stage.
Photos
by Jenny Graham
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