“Manahatta” dramatizes two pivotal, and shameful, moments in New York City history, occurring four centuries apart — the Dutch West India Company’s “purchase” of the island of Manhattan from the Lenape Indians (who had no concept of land ownership), and the world-wide financial crisis of 2008, In Mary Kathryn Nagle’s sharply written play, which is wonderfully acted under Laurie Woolery’s seamless direction, the two events tell much the same story.
We first meet Jane Snake (Elizabeth Frances), a top graduate of MIT and Stanford Business School, in a job interview at a Wall Street firm, persuading a skeptical executive (Joe Tapper) to hire her as an investment banker. Joe is skeptical because he thinks she’s just another one of the many recent “fancy schmancy ivy league” graduates who don’t really want the job but don’t know what else to do with their lives.
“I left my dad to come here,” Jane replies. “He’s in Oklahoma.”
“Dads don’t generally participate in our interviews”
“He’s in the hospital having open heart surgery.” But she didn’t stay to be with him, instead traveling to New York because she wants this job badly; she’s not like the other candidates; her parents didn’t even graduate from high school, much less push her to be a go-getter, as have the parents of her competitors: “I am not one of them…I knocked down every obstacle they placed in my way.”
She gets the job. She also loses her dad; the surgery was not successful. In the next scene, she is back in Oklahoma with her family, getting ready for her father’s funeral, a service that irks Jane’s mother Bobbie (Sheila Tousey.) “Your ancestors in Manahatta didn’t say goodbye to their relations in a church…When my parents died, we buried them the Indian way.”
Like the other members of the Lenape Nation, Jane and Bobbie’s ancestors were forced to leave Manahatta – which in Lenape means “island of many hills” – and travel through a “Trail of Broken Treaties” to land in five different states before they eventually wound up in Oklahoma.
To Bobbie, all this feels personal (Tousey gets the best monologues.) What her ancestors lived through is in the present for her as well as in the past.
And that becomes true theatrically for the audience as well, starting in the next scene, when Frances (without a change of costume) has suddenly become Le-le-wa’-you, who is scraping the fat off beaver fur pelts, to get them ready to trade to the newly arrived Dutch traders.
Each of the seven actors in “Manahatta” portrays two characters, one in each era (with some subtly playful overlap in Lux Haac’s costume design), as the dual stories lead inexorably, and simultaneously, to their awful outcomes. Tousey is Frances’ mother in both eras, Rainbow Dickerson her sister. Enrico Nassi is a decent, protective (swoonworthy) Lenape man in both eras — the great Se-ket-tu-may-qua ( Black Beaver) in the 17th century, the modest Luke in the 21st; both in love with Frances’ characters.
The parallels for the three non-Indian pairs of characters are blunt. When Le-le-wa’-you makes contact with the Dutch traders, despite Black Beaver’s protective advice to stay away from them, she starts learning their language (presumably Dutch, though we hear English.) “She speaks,” one says in surprise (not “she speaks my language” but simply “she speaks,” an indication that they view themselves as the center of the world – much as the modern-day equivalents traders see themselves (in Tom Wolfe’s phrase) as masters of the universe.
Jeffrey King is Dick, a ruthless chief executive of Jane’s new investment bank and also Peter Minuit, the governor of the Dutch colony who takes over the island from the unsuspecting Lenape. Joe Tapper is Joe, Jane’s boss and Dick’s underling, and Jakob, Peter Minuit’s underling. In both eras, despite his gruff exterior, he emerges as a voice of relative compassion, trying to moderate his boss’s brutality, to no avail.
David Kelly is a well-meaning but ineffectual Christian in both eras – as Jonas Michaelius, a missionary he is aghast at the violence by Minuit and his minions towards the Native Americans. As Michael, he was a fellow churchgoer with jane’s father; he is also a local banker in Oklahoma, who tries to help out Bobbie financially, and by doing so, ruins her life.
That last plot development initially gave me pause. In order to show how this individual family was affected by the financial shenanigans that led to the 2008 crisis, the play shows Bobbie taking out a mortgage on her house in order to pay for the surgery for her husband, which insurance wouldn’t cover. Her debt spirals out of control.
But here her daughter has become a Wall Street banker, surely rich enough to cover any of her mother’s debts. The playwright gets around this by making Bobbie too proud to ask her daughter for money. She implies this has something to do with the culture of the Lenape people. If they now understand what “ownership” means, it’s still low in their priorities.
For everybody, apparently, except Jane (and Le-le-wa’-you.) This may be the playwright’s cautionary tale about the perils of assimilation. But something else is going on as well.
Playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle is an attorney who works on behalf of Indian Nations, and she is herself a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. There’s no denying that “Manahatta” is in part her effort to impart her love and respect for Native American culture. Marcelo Martínez García’s set is spare — a wooden desk and chairs, a few miniature boulders, at one point flashing lights to simulate an electric ticker – but that culture is evident in the dialogue: We learn that Pearl Street in the financial district was where the Lenape would collect shells; Bobbie talks about the wampum necklace she inherited from her “great-great-great-great grandma.”
But placed on that wooden table throughout “Manahatta,”there is a vase with a tulip in it. At one point, Peter Minuit explains (only slightly anachronistically) what we’ve come to call Tulip Mania – when tulips in 1637 were selling at astronomical prices – until the market suddenly collapsed; “the classic example of a financial bubble,” as economists explain: “when the price of something goes up and up, not because of its intrinsic value, but because people who buy it expect to be able to sell it again at a profit.”
Another example of a financial bubble? Housing, backed by mortgage-backed securities, whose burst led to the Great Recession in 2008.
Nagle is smart and artful enough to avoid overt lectures on economics. But it seems clear that “Manahatta” is not just a play about indigenous people. Deftly, like the plays of Ayad Akhtar (Junk, Disgraced, The Invisible Hand), it offers a morality tale about capitalism.
Manahatta
Public Theater through December 23
Running time:1 hour 40 minutes with no intermission
Tickets: $40-$60
Written by Mary Kathryn Nagle
Directed by Laurie Woolery
Scenic design by Marcelo Martínez García, costume design by Lux Haac ,lighting design by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew,sound design and composition by Paul James Prendergast, prop management by Rachel M.F. Kenner, fight and intimacy direction by Kelsey Rainwater, and movement direction by Ty Defoe. Executive Director and Co-founder of The Lenape Center Joe Baker serves as the cultural consultant. Amanda Nita Luke-Sayed is the production stage manager and Janelle Caso is the stage manager.
Cast: Rainbow Dickerson (Toosh-ki-pa-kwis-i/Debra), Elizabeth Frances(Le-le-wa’-you/Jane), David Kelly(Jonas Michaelius / Michael), Jeffrey King (Peter Minuit/ Dick), Enrico Nassi (Se-ket-tu-may-qua / Luke), Jessica Ranville (Understudy), Joe Tapper (Jakob/Joe), Sheila Tousey (Mother/Bobbie), and Rex Young (Understudy)
