The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
SOLD OUT AGAIN IN ‘MANAHATTA’
Mortgage crisis echoes history in play by first Native American writer at Yale Rep
“You can’t create a country by taking someone else’s home and ... be surprised when it happens to the descendants of the people who did the same 400 years ago.”
Mary Kathryn Nagle, playwright, “Manahatta”
Yale Repertory Theatre’s new production of “Manahatta” — in previews now and officially opening Thursday at the Rep — marks a milestone for both the playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle and the Tony-winning regional theater in its 54th year.
“My play happens to be the first play by a Native (American) playwright that Yale Rep has ever produced,” said Nagle, an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, a practicing lawyer and an accomplished dramatist. “What Yale Rep is doing is giving native people a seat at the table,” said Nagle.
“Manahatta,” which continues through Feb. 15 under Laurie Woolery’s direction, brings us back to 2008 on the cusp of that year’s devastating mortgage crisis. Securities trader Jane Snake arrives on Wall Street with a desirable job and the prospect of vast wealth. Yet her sense of identity and humanity collide with the history of her ancestors, the Lenape, who were expunged from Jane’s newly adopted home when the Dutch “purchased” the island of Manhattan for $24.
Nagle crafts her story through parallel plots from the past and 2008, unfolding simultaneously as Jane tries to save her own family from financial ruin by fraud.
“Manahatta” features a cast of Carla-Rae, Danforth Comins, Steven Flores, Lily Gladstone, Jeffrey King, Shyla Lefner and T. Ryder Smith. The design team includes movement direction by Ty Defoe, scenic design by Mariana Sanchez and Lenape consultation by Joe Baker, executive director of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research in Connecticut . “Most theaters in the United States have never produced a single play by a native playwright,” said Nagle. “So to have a program here at Yale that puts native work in front of the Yale community is really important because in most cultural institutions in the United States, we are completely silenced.”
Nagle has been instrumental in blazing her path going back to 2015, when she served four years as the first executive director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program, before Madeline Sayet took the reins. The program supports Native American artists directly, said Nagle, and exposes native arts and culture to the Yale community. Nagle and her colleagues hosted new play workshops and play writing contests for native writers, and invited native actors and artists to perform.
Yale history professor Ned Blackhawk initially invited Nagle to town five years ago this March to perform a staged reading of her play “Sliver of a Full Moon” at Yale Law School. Nagle said she wrote the play in response to the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act.
Afterward, Nagle said, Blackhawk was pleasantly struck by how the reading affected the students.
“He said that many students attending the performance with native actors and survivors performing a story here at the Law School is one of the most profound experiences they’ve had in their four years at Yale,” Nagle said.
Such was the success of the reading that Blackhawk sought and found funding from Yale to bring Nagle aboard.
When Jane Shark starts her story in 2008, playwright Nagle was clerking for a federal district judge in Omaha, Neb., at the time. Born and raised in Oklahoma City, Nagle earned her bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and her law degree from Tulane University.
Nagle moved to New York in 2010 to work for a law firm called Crane and Manual, representing Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac in suits against 20 banks for misrepresenting the value of the notes they sold to both loan institutions. In interviews with homeowners and bankers alike, Nagle culled more than just cases. She absorbed crucial cultural artifacts from both the unsuspecting customers and predatory financial institutions.
“You spend hours talking with ... deposing people and reading email,” she said, “you learn their language, rhythm and culture.
“I felt a real sense of devastation,” said Nagle, who only cherry-picked useful episodes from public records and not from confidential files. “I know how many people lost their homes. To me, it’s tragic, but not shocking because this is how the United States began,” Nagle said. “You can’t create a country by taking someone else’s home and justifying that as a moral conquest and be surprised when it happens to the descendants of the people who did the same 400 years ago.
“So I really felt that connection,” added Nagle, a partner at Pipestem
Lily Gladstone as Jane and Danforth Comins as Joe and Jakob in a scene from “Manahatta” at Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven.
Jeffrey King, left, who plays the parts of Dick Fuld and Peter Minuit, and T. Ryder Smith (Michael and Jonas Michaelius) rehearse a scene for “Manahatta” at the Yale Repertory Theatre.
Law specializing in tribal sovereignty of native nations and peoples, “like it’s horrible and it’s wrong, but this is what’s going to happen in the United States until we fully acknowledge the wrongs of the past and teach our children that what we did before, we shouldn’t do.”
How then may our country ever reckon with its past? “When people ask me that question, I say ‘that’s a great question. Why don’t you let your theater produce the first native playwright in the history of the United States?” Nagle said, adding a native Supreme Court Justice to her wish list.
“Once we’re given a seat at your table, then let us have that conversation,” said Nagle. “Then people freak out, like ‘Oh! What you’re asking for is us to give all the land back!’ she said. “No, we’re just asking you to stop erasing us. And once you’ve stopped erasing us, and we have a seat at the table, then let’s have that conversation.
“Every single inch of land was within the sovereign tribal nation that creates the United States,” Nagle said. “And most of our nations have been erased. Most of our histories have been erased. Our issues have been erased.”
This, Nagle said, is largely why there’s so much resistance to doing native plays. “Even if most people don’t think of it consciously, most Americans, on the whole, aren’t ready to deal with that part of American identity, and the reality of how America became the United States.
“In terms of correcting the harms of the past, the very first thing we really have to do is confront the erasure,” Nagle said. “Because to really figure out how to heal the wounds of the past, we have to engage in a real dialogue, human to human.”