‘Between Two Knees’ Review: A Virtuosic Romp Through a Century of Terrors

Rapid-fire punchlines and crafty sight gags may not seem the most obvious means to convey a brutal history of displacement and extermination. But “Between Two Knees,” which opened at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Manhattan on Tuesday, uses both in an audaciously sidesplitting comedy that’s an indictment of Native American persecution.

The show’s antic account of Indigenous struggle was written by the 1491s, an intertribal sketch comedy troupe that includes Sterlin Harjo, a creator of “Reservation Dogs.” The action is bookended by two deadly standoffs: the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, where U.S. soldiers killed as many as 300 members of the Lakota Sioux tribe, and the occupation of that site in 1973 by the American Indian Movement and its supporters, who were protesting government injustice.

A narrator named Larry (Justin Gauthier) welcomes the audience with the casual air of a stand-up breaking in the crowd, saying that Indians have experienced some “pretty dark” stuff. White audience members are warned that guilt pangs lie ahead — and encouraged to assuage them by depositing donations into a basket being passed around. “Don’t be cheap now,” Larry prods. “I promise, when you leave, you will still own everything.”

Playful daggers like these are cloaked throughout the production, directed with ingenuity and finesse by Eric Ting, with a vaudeville-style emphasis on amusement and artifice.

When we meet Ina (a wryly deadpan Sheila Tousey) clutching her baby during the Wounded Knee massacre, for example, an ensemble member demonstrates the severity of Ina’s wounds by detaching her false arm and absconding offstage with it. (Victims of the siege, many of them women and children, were unarmed.) A red streamer unfurls from Ina’s shoulder like a clown’s handkerchief, the show’s recurring signifier of bloodshed.

Ina’s murder starts a multigenerational story that follows her descendants’ turmoil through the 20th century: Ina’s orphaned son Isaiah (Derek Garza) and his love interest, Irma (Shyla Lefner), defeat the wicked nuns at their Native American boarding school (a video-game-style showdown with witty projections by Shawn Duan) to become vigilantes. Their son William, a.k.a. Wolf (Shaun Taylor-Corbett), departs to fight in World War II. A cascade of soapy twists, including a baby left on a doorstep, eventually leads the family back to Wounded Knee.