Wood Bones Review: Native American Theater in New York
May 16, 2013 Leave a comment
Albert Ybarra as Leroy in “Wood Bones”
“Wood Bones,” a play by William S. Yellow Robe, Jr. that marks the inaugural production of The Eagle Project, a Native American theater company in New York City, is a work that excited me – until I actually attended it.
“When was the last time you saw a Native Tribal play, written by a Native Tribal person, featuring a Native Tribal cast?“ playwright Yellow Robe, who is a member of the Assiniboine Tribe and grew up in Wolf Point, Montana on a reservation, asked interviewer Adam Szymkowicz. As he told Native News Network,“it is important for us to tell our stories, otherwise, they will not be told.”
“Wood Bones” is produced by a new New York theater company, led by artistic director Ryan Victor Pierce (aka Little Eagle, a member of the Naticoke Lenni-Lenape tribe), who believes that theater should be a “sacred place where ideas flow…and uncomfortable truths can be voiced.”
The play is based on an intriguing, if not wholly unfamiliar, premise — the different people who have lived in a single house. The house itself – or the spirit of the house — is a character, named 121, its street address, portrayed by actress Dawn Jamieson.
The first act begins with a scene between 121 and a Native American named Leroy, conducting some kind of ritual. Then there is a scene with a Native American couple looking to buy the house, followed by one with two men fixing up the place and complaining of previous tenants. The scene switches to another couple, a Native American man named Sam married to a white woman named Christen, who has a black child Mary from a previous encounter. They too are about to buy the house. Sam expresses prejudice against his adopted daughter while with his wife; but he is secretly molesting her. Through each of these scenes, 121 attempts to talk to the characters, and they think it’s the house settling, or wonder whether it means the place is haunted. Only Leroy is able to talk with 121 directly.
By intermission, I was itching to leave. It is an uncomfortable truth that the performance I saw was poorly done. In fairness, it was clearly an off night: One of the regular actors had an emergency and was replaced by the director, who was on book. It’s hard to see, though, how this explains the glacial pace of nearly every scene in the first act. In addition, the chronology was unclear. Virtually no effort was made to establish in what era each scene was taking place. Were we going back and forth in time? Was this all supposed to be happening in current times, offering alternative realities? Were the playwright and/or director being inattentive, or were they trying to make a point — that time is fluid, and eras unimportant? The lack of clarity was disorienting, and the cumulative experience dulling.
Veracity Butcher and Freedome Bradley
Guilt and inertia kept me in my seat for the second act; also habit and policy. And, as is often the case when I’ve committed to seeing through to the end of a show that I’ve given up on, I discovered something worthwhile in the second act. There is a scene when the sheriff and the owner of the property confront the Native American couple who’ve just signed the lease and moved into the house, Jacob and Vera, played by the exquisitely named actors Freedome Bradley and Veracity Butcher. The lease was with the owner’s father, who has been declared incompetent, and so they are being evicted. It’s a heavy-handed scene — the owner is a jerk whose bigotry is so over-the-top that audiences can too easily dismiss it as unrealistic, especially since it is not completely clear in what era this is occurring — but the scene’s intensity suggests what this play could have been. In another scene, the two men “renovating” the house are revealed to be in truth ransacking it, selling off its valuable fixtures, and cutting it up into apartments, which might well serve as a metaphor for the Native American experience.
Threaded through “Wood Bones” are enough provocative if not fully explained allusions to Native American culture and practice to cheer on The Eagle Project in its mission, and hope for a more satisfying realization of it.
Eagle Project at Abingdon Theater Arts Complex
312 West 36th Street
Written by William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.
Directed by Bob Jaffe
Cast: Dawn Jamieson (121), Albert Ybarra (Leroy), Jacob (Freedome Bradley), Vera (Veracity Butcher), David Fierro (Neal), Ryan Victor Pierce (Calvin), Robert Baumgardner (Sam), Joleen Wilkinson (Christen), Eden Sanaa Duncan-Smith (Mary)
Through May 18th
The motto of the festival — 1,000+ Plays. 300+ Playwrights. 10 Cities. 1 Minute
Is there a theme at the Brick’s One Minute Play Festival?
By the end of the first scene of the first-ever revival of “Moose Murders,” which attained legendary status as the worst flop in Broadway history, I thought to myself: This is really not any worse than many shows you can see in the neighborhood. Playing at the John Connelly Theater in the East Village near Avenue B, The Beautiful Soup Theater Collective’s production of this arch comedy/mystery features outlandish characters doing outrageous things, sprinkled with pop culture references. Doesn’t this describe many of the shows at the Fringe Festival?
“Critic Frank Rich called it ‘A show so preposterous that it made minor celebrities out of everyone who witnessed it.’ John Simon, writing for New York magazine, said it seemed as if the play were staged by ‘a blind director repeatedly kicked in the groin.’ The legacy of Moose Murders is so notorious that the New York Times has called it ‘the standard of awfulness against which all Broadway flops are judged.’”
I had the exact same thoughts once the play began, and we in the audience were introduced to the Wild Moose Lodge in the Adirondacks where caretaker Joe, dressed in an Indian headdress, berates the talentless duo of Snooks and her blind husband Howie. All three are being kicked out by the new owners the Halloways – Hedda, her three children, her daughter’s husband, and her own husband, Sydney, who is wrapped like a mummy in a wheelchair. He is taken care of, not very well, by Nurse Dagmar. Over the course of the play, which (I’m told) lasts about two and a half hours, each of them is killed one by one.
Radiohole’s Inflatable Frankenstein
G
Jan 9 – 18
