For some time now, some New York City theaters have been acknowledging that they stand on land originally inhabited by members of the indigenous Lenape tribe. Right now, the Public Theater is expanding on those acknowledgements by putting them on stage.
The production is Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Manahatta, which has been in Public Theater development for a decade and is now as welcome as the Lenapes have been for the last four-hundred years and more in lower Manhattan. Okay granted, maybe not so often widely welcome.
Playwright Nagle, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, has somberly and wittily imagined two time periods during which the action takes place. One is the Manahatta phase when the native population lived as the Dutch arrived with acquisitorty intentions. Initially, fur-trading began, with wampum as the exchange currency and eventually shifting — dictated by the new- coming marauders — to dollars.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
The second timeframe is the couple of years leading to stock-market-disastrous 2008. A Lenape descendent leaves her family in Anadarko, Oklahoma to work on Wall Street as a trader. She’s the first woman to hold the vaunted position. (Don’t overlook Nagle slyly pairing the early form of trading with the latter form, both not that different when you think about it.)
In the 17th-century sequences, sisters Le-le-wa’-you (Elizabeth Francis) and Toosh-ki-pa-kwis-i (Rainbow Dickerson) interact with their Mother (Sheila Tousey) and with Se-ket-tu-may-qua (Enrico Nassi), lover to Le-le-wa’-you. The four interact with Peter Minuit (Jeffrey King), Jakob (Joe Tapper), and Jonas Michaelius (David Kelly), leading to the Infamously manipulative 1626 Manahatta sale. (Although everybody knows about – or think they know about — the 24-dollar Manhattan price tag, Nagle chooses not to include it, undoubtedly for inconclusive accuracy reasons.)
In the 21st-century sequences, would-be-and-then-trader Jane Snake (Francis) tangles with argumentative broker Joe (Tapper), who’s reluctant at first to hire her. She also mingles with corporate superior Dick (King) and co-worker Michael (Kelly) as they dally in the market until Lehman Brothers throws in the bear-ish towel and only some Wall Streeters go on, perhaps, to better days.
Simultaneously in the early years of this century, Bobbie (Tousey), mother to Jane, and Debra (Dickerson), Jane’s sister, resent Jane’s leaving Oklahoma for Wall Street. They remain so on her occasional visits home, Bobbie even refusing help for paying off a mortgage. She insists Indian land is never owned but only temporarily lent.
That, in short, is Nagle’s extremely intricate plot. The complicating fact is that the two parts do not unfold sequentially. They’re intermingled. In her stage directions, Nagle even stipulates that she intends “to make clear to the audience that past and present overlap and coexist. Indeed, they are the same.”
Nagle wants the difficult issues with which she’s ingeniously reckoning to register as hardly different but uncomfortably similar then and now. Not only the prominence of trading, but still-disturbing racial and gender biases are underlined. She subtly stresses the conflict between paying homage to the troubled past and the desire to leave it behind. She drops in a stereotypical joke to focus briefly on that strain of embarrassment. Moreover, she floats the large question as to who owns the land, a crafty poke at capitalism for which Wall Street is now the global, uh, capital. All the same, she insists, Pearl Street and environs were once regularly trod by the Lenape tribe.
Nagle, keeping her praiseworthy and long-polished gravitas in play, deserves and wins respect, but does her much-refined plan operate as effectively as she wants? Throughout, aren’t her characters — when wearing contemporary clothes most of the duration and only sometimes adding vintage collars and the like — testing audience understanding? (Lux Haac is the costumer.)
Do audience members eventually catch up with Nagle, or, after a while, do they just adapt a continuing where-are-we-now attitude and so make the best of an otherwise unifying play in a world that so urgently needs unification?
Speaking of unification, Nagle’s double-pronged plots are played out on Marcelo Martínez Garcia’s set that, intentionally or not, might be taken as further complicating matters. Upstage of a long table, a gray rockpile and a few other furnishings is a reflecting backdrop that expands the set to twice its size as it distorts what’s held up for view. What is its purpose, other than to give the illusion that the playing area is twice its size? Is it meant to symbolize the two eras with which Manahatta is concerned? No? Okay, whatever.
What Manahatta can take pride in is the cast brought together by careful director Laurie Woolery and the Public’s casting folks, Heidi Griffiths, Jordan Thaler, and Joy Dickson. In his bio, Nassi mentions he’s an enrolled member of The Otoe-Missouria Tribe/Cherokee Nation. Great to know. How times have changed with the advent of this play and others of like origins across the populations. How finally current they are.
Manahatta opened December 5, 2023, at the Public Theater and runs through December 23. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
