It’s hard to avoid the sound of gears grinding while you’re watching Manahatta, now playing at the Public Theater. Mary Kathryn Nagle’s drama takes place both in modern times, culminating in the 2008 financial crisis, and in the 1600s, when both Native Americans and Dutch settlers were populating the island that gives the play its name. As the action shifts back and forth in time, it painstakingly accentuates the similarities in the manner in which the country’s original inhabitants were screwed over by the European colonists and modern-day Americans by exploitative financial markets. By the time the evening’s over, you’ll be impressed by the playwright’s logistical ingenuity. But you won’t have been particularly moved. Manahatta ultimately feels like a thesis in search of a play.
The central character is Jane Snake (Elizabeth Frances), of Lenape descent, who travels from her native Oklahoma to New York City for a job interview at Lehman Brothers on the same day that her father is undergoing a serious heart operation. She gets the job working on Wall Street, which proves ironic because, as the play would have it, the street was named for the wall built by the Dutch to keep the “Indians” out (actually, it was designed to repel the English, but never mind). Nearby streets include Broadway, which is the “Broad Way” where the Indians traded, and Pearl Street, where they collected shells for wampum.
It quickly becomes apparent what the playwright is up to with her intertwined tales of Jane’s struggles at her job under the supervision of her demanding boss Joe (Joe Tapper) and his even more demanding boss Dick (Jeffrey King), and her ancestors’ conflicts with the Dutch West India Company settlers who bought their homeland from them for a pittance and then subjected them to onerous taxation, not to mention wanton slaughter. The 2008 housing crisis, in which Jane plays no small part, is made personal by the plight of her mother Bobbie (Sheila Tousey, excellent), who’s in danger of losing her home due to the huge medical bills resulting from her husband’s unsuccessful surgery.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
The play’s obvious schematics and heavy didacticism would be less of a problem if it featured more nuanced characterizations. But the characters feel one-note in both historical settings, and the obvious double casting doesn’t do it any favors. As an example, Jeffrey King plays both the rapacious Lehman executive and Peter Minuit, who orchestrated the purchase of what was then known as Manahatta. So you know he’s a bad guy no matter what the era.
The dialogue never proves subtle, and is often worse than that. When Jane first gets hired by Joe, who’s clearly seen the movie Wall Street one too many times, he says, “Let me tell you about Manhattan. When you’re not from here, when you’re from somewhere else, this place can be hell. It’ll eat you up, chew you up, and spit you out. There will be days when you think everyone is against you. But if you stick it out, if you give it all you got, you’ll see Manhattan has more to offer than any other place in the world.” And then he bursts into the song “New York, New York.”
Only kidding about the last part. But as you can see, natural-sounding dialogue clearly isn’t the playwright’s forte, unless you think characters sounding like they’ve stepped out of a 1930’s Warner Brother musical is a good thing. The parallels between past and present are equally forced; if there’s a scene in which the Dutch introduce the Lenape to the pleasures of brandy, you can be sure there’ll be a scene in the present day in which Jane tries it for the first time as well.
The play’s shifting chronology frequently proves confusing on the cramped stage featuring minimal scenery, with director Laurie Woolery not fully successful in delineating the different time frames. The actors, all of whom play dual roles, do their best with the material but in the scenes set in the past they sometimes come across like performers in a history pageant.
There’s no denying that Manahatta makes important points about our shoddy treatment of Native Americans both past and present. But there’s also no denying that better dramaturgical skill is necessary to make those points come alive.
Manahatta opened December 5, 2023, at the Public Theater and runs through December 23. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
