Nagle, Mary Kathryn

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    ‘Manahatta’ Review: Tracing the Blood-Soaked Roots of American Capitalism

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    Straddling the 17th and early 21st centuries, Mary Kathryn Nagle’s play at the Public Theater examines the exploitation of the Lenape by Dutch settlers.Acknowledgments that New York was once home to the Lenape people have become a familiar refrain at arts venues. In “Manahatta,” the playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle undertakes a vital investigation of that willfully forgotten history so often rendered in shorthand. Now open at the Public Theater, just a few subway stops away from Wall Street, Nagle’s play traces the origins of American finance and the follies of its bottomless appetite for capital to the exploitation of the Lenape by the city’s Dutch settlers.The Lenape people have been so forcefully expelled from their Northeastern homelands that the descendants Nagle depicts, beginning in 2002, live in what is now Oklahoma. Jane (Elizabeth Frances), an MIT and Stanford graduate, is interviewing for an entry-level Wall Street job when her father dies on an operating table. By the time she returns home, her sister Debra (Rainbow Dickerson) and their mother Bobbie (a delightfully dry Sheila Tousey) are preparing for his funeral, and Bobbie is stuck with medical bills because the Indian Health Service, a government agency responsible for providing health services to Native peoples, has refused payment.Intercut with this family drama are fable-like scenes set in 17th-century Manahatta, where West India Company traders barter with the Lenape for furs coveted by the women they left behind in the Old World. The ensemble of seven actors appear in both timelines, including Enrico Nassi, who plays Luke, Jane’s childhood friend and would-be sweetheart, and Se-ket-tu-may-qua, an emissary who communicates with the Dutch and teaches Le-le-wa’-you, a Lenape woman also played by Frances, to speak their foreign tongue. Back in Manhattan, Jane is learning the sort of blustery talk necessary to chart her climb through the corporate ranks.First developed at the Public in 2014, when Nagle was a member of its Emerging Writers Group, “Manahatta” premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2018. Its purview is promising and ambitious: In addition to the blood-soaked roots of American capitalism, Nagle addresses the erasure of Native languages through forced assimilation, and the irrevocable impacts of Western violence, religion and consumer currency on Native culture.But the concept of homeownership, in the modern sense of subprime mortgages and the more ancient one of who can lay claims to land, forms the strongest throughline: The Dutch dupe a Lenape elder, played by Tousey, into selling them Manahatta for a song, while Michael (David Kelly), who is both the local pastor and a banker, helps Bobbie take out a loan against her house. Jane, though not without her misgivings, is meanwhile helping to manufacture the 2008 financial crisis, by selling mortgage-backed securities — it turns out she works for Lehman Brothers.Sheila Tousey, center, with ensemble members, all of whom appear in both timelines.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDirected by Laurie Woolery, the production shifts seamlessly between the alternating time periods and locales, on a wilderness-meets-boardroom set by Marcelo Martínez García, and with particular help from Lux Haac’s costumes, whose fusion of fabrics and styles (a pinstripe pilgrim silhouette, for example) accomplish an impressive narrative arc on their own.The play draws direct, and at times reductive, parallels between the past and recent present. Jane’s bigwig bosses, played by Joe Tapper and Jeffrey King, are flat, greedy villains, figured as heirs to the deceptive, and ultimately murderous, founders of the market system (Tapper’s Dutch trader, at least, demonstrates some measure of humanity). But the white bad guys’ lack of complexity, though a missed opportunity, isn’t the most pressing problem.The Native characters, too, are almost exclusively products of circumstance, reacting to the systems that oppress them rather than approaching life with innate motivations. That defensive posture is understandable in the colonial context, but when Jane is asked why she wants to work on Wall Street, her only answer is because she has overcome obstacles to get there. Jane’s professional trajectory is rather one piece of Nagle’s grand design, which feels undersynthesized throughout much of the show’s 105-minute running time until it reaches a too-obvious conclusion.Even if this corrective account does not feel convincingly yoked to the drama onstage, an urgent significance to the facts is laid out in “Manahatta.” Nagle notes in the script that the play is a work of fiction, though it’s based on real events and was written in consultation with Lenape elders, whose ancestors are often evoked before curtains rise on New York stages. We would all do well to remember what they have lost.ManahattaThrough Dec. 23 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      ‘Manahatta,’ Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Play About the Lenape, Comes Home

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      The show, which toggles between the 17th century and the early 21st, arrives on the island on which it is largely set.Mary Kathryn Nagle moved to Manhattan in 2010. Back then, she would often run to work along a path that skirted the East River, absorbing the city and its history from the shoreline.“I was interested in learning more about whose lands I was on,” she said.Nagle, a lawyer and a playwright, grew up in Oklahoma, an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She had not known much about the Lenape, Manhattan’s original residents, though Lenape tribes (some of whom refer to themselves as Delaware Indians) lived in Anadarko and Bartlesville, not far from her hometown. That year, through contacts at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, she discovered more, including details of the purchase of Manhattan, which was then part of the Lenape’s homeland, Lenapehoking, by Dutch colonists.This was not long after the 2008 financial crisis. Nagle’s firm, Quinn Emanuel, was engaged in litigation, suing banks implicated in that crisis. The ceding of Manhattan and the subprime mortgage catastrophe began to mingle in her mind, especially once she discovered that Wall Street, a fulcrum of the subprime collapse, was named for the wall built by the Dutch to keep the Lenape out.These dueling histories, recent and long ago, inspired Nagle’s play “Manahatta.” Now in previews at the Public Theater, it will run through Dec. 23. Named for the Lenape word for Manhattan, which translates to “island of many hills,” the drama volleys between the 17th century and the early 21st, and between Manahatta and Manhattan and Anadarko. The seven actors in the cast each play a character in each period. This is the play’s third production, but the first on the island on which it is largely set.“It got really real when we all descended upon Manhattan,” said Rainbow Dickerson, an actress who has been with the play since 2018. “We feel it. We feel it every day.”I met with Nagle, who was nine months pregnant, earlier this month on a warmish Saturday evening just after rehearsal. She had agreed to walk around Lower Manhattan, along streets that pertain to the play. We began on Pearl Street, named, Nagle said, for the mounds of oyster shells the Lenape had left there.Then she moved past Beaver Street, named to reflect the fur trade, and onto Wall Street, where no trace of a wall remained, and then to Broadway, which runs at an oblique angle, reflecting a Lenape trading route. “It is not a street created by the colonizers,” she said.It was dark by then. And any vestiges of the Lenape were long paved over. “At the end of the day, even when you do see grass in Manhattan, it was probably concrete and then changed back to grass,” she said. But she could still feel some remnant, she said, particularly at the island’s tip.Rainbow Dickerson, standing, and Sheila Tousey in “Manahatta” at the Public Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“They had ceremony, they had prayer at the water’s edge,” she said. “So even though we have changed the outline of the island in terms of where it meets the water, that shoreline is still here.” So is the sun, she continued. And the moon. “We’ve imposed so much on top of this island,” she added. “But in a way nature is still here.”Nagle, 40, has the focused, no-nonsense demeanor one might expect of a lawyer specializing in federal Indian law and appellate litigation, and the occasional flights of lyricism fitting for a playwright. She wrote the first draft of “Manahatta” in 2013, as part of the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group. She moved back to Oklahoma in 2015, but the play stayed with her. “Manahatta” had its world premiere in 2018 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and was produced in 2020 by Yale Repertory Theater.“Nagle,” one reviewer of the Oregon production wrote, “weaves the stories together skillfully, one mirroring the other, often using the same language, to drive home the point that the American story has always been one of putting commerce above people, especially when those people aren’t white. It’s devastating.”As “Manahatta” evolved, it came to center on Jane Snake, a Lenape econometrics whiz hired by a Manhattan investment bank. (The same actress also plays Le-le-wa’-you, a 17th-century Lenape woman.) Through Jane’s conflicting ambitions, desires and loyalties, Nagle explores questions of ownership and allegiance. Jane reminds her in some ways of herself, a young woman who believed she had to leave Oklahoma to make her way in the world. The character’s choices are not always ones that Nagle, who has since relocated to Washington, D.C., might have made, but it was important to her that Jane felt real and active, not merely the victim of a wider, non-Indigenous world.“Probably every play of mine is critiquing a white system of power that has been forced on us,” she said. “But also, it’s 2023, we’re all living in it now. So how are we responsible? How are we involved?”The director Laurie Woolery has been with the play since its premiere in Oregon. She was initially attracted to the challenge of the play and how it demanded that the actors move back and forth in time without any major change of scene.“I’m really drawn to work that feels impossible to stage,” she said during a recent interview at the Public Theater.But traveling between two eras was only one difficulty. Avoiding stereotypes was just as important. “There’s so many different ways in which we have been depicted in American culture not based on fact, reality or truth,” Nagle said. “If you want to present the truth, you’re doing that in a space where your representation has been not authentic. So you’ve got to deconstruct that before you can fully introduce the authentic, and that’s a challenge.”While there is no Lenape performer among the cast (casting directors would not have asked about particular tribal enrollment during auditions), the production has hired Joe Baker, a co-founder and the executive director of the Lenape Center in New York, as a cultural consultant.Baker has advised the production on matters of costume, props, language and Lenape aesthetics. “We’ve had many conversations about different traditions, different characters,” he said in a phone interview. Asked if Nagle’s play felt truthful to the Lenape experience, he said that it did.“There is clarity there,” he said. “She totally understands the protocol, the practice.”Lenape artists have also contributed some of the show’s props and design elements, including a wampum necklace, which Woolery shared as she led a recent technical rehearsal. “It’s a gift for us,” she said, holding out the three-strand necklace, “to keep us rooted.”Avoiding stereotypes is perhaps slightly easier now than it was a decade ago, when Nagle began her playwriting career. (Her other plays include “Sliver of a Full Moon,” Sovereignty” and “Crossing Mnisose.”) Recent years have brought many more depictions of Native Americans onscreen, often in projects created by or with Native writers and directors. And Native playwrights are experiencing more prominence, too. Nagle mentioned peers like DeLanna Studi (“Flight”), Madeline Sayet (“Where We Belong”) and, particularly, Larissa FastHorse, whose “Thanksgiving Play” had its Broadway debut last season.“The whole landscape has changed,” Nagle said. “It’s not enough. It’s definitely not enough. But we had our first Native woman on Broadway, which is a big deal.”What would be enough?“When we’re as much in the American theater canon as any other group,” she said.Nagle’s ambitions have always been as political as they are literary. If she has a need to tell stories, she also has the canny understanding that stories can be more persuasive than any number of appellate briefs.“In playwriting you can make an argument and force people to listen to it and hear it, in a way that they will never listen to it or hear it in a legal argument,” she said.The arguments here have to do with how history repeats itself and the dangers of making homes into tradable commodities. And as the play began preview performances just before Thanksgiving — the rare holiday that involves Indigenous history, however mythologized — and opens just after, it is also intended as a corrective to previous forms of representation.“My hope with ‘Manahatta’ is that we can provide non-Native Americans with a genuine narrative about Native people that just might supplant one or more of the false narratives American society has ingrained in them,” Nagle said.The significance of telling this particular story only a mile or two from where it happened has not been lost on any of the “Manahatta” cast or crew. “How do we recognize that we are standing on the ground of Lenapehoking and the genocide and forced removal of that tribe?” Woolery asked just before a rehearsal. “That’s a lot to hold.”Baker, the Lenape cultural consultant, was glad to see the play come home. He sees traces of the Lenape everywhere in Manhattan. “Everything you see is Lenape,” he said. “The breath and vitality of this place continues.” He hopes that audiences will learn something of the place’s history and its Indigenous people.“It’s a significant, significant moment,” he said. “And it’s exciting to share this moment.” More

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      in Music

      Alicia Keys Is Making a Musical. Her Own Life Inspired the Story.

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      The show is a highlight of the Public Theater’s new season, which will also include plays by Suzan-Lori Parks, Itamar Moses, Mary Kathryn Nagle and Ife Olujobi.For more than a decade, Alicia Keys has been quietly developing a musical inspired by her own turbulent adolescence growing up among artists in New York City. Now that musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” is almost ready for viewing: It will be staged this fall at the Public Theater, the downtown nonprofit where “A Chorus Line” and “Hamilton” were born.By any measure, the musical will be big: It has a cast of 20, the biggest budget of any show the Public has ever done, and, of course, music by Keys, an R&B and pop singer who has sold tens of millions of records. The show will feature some of Keys’s best known songs, as well as new material she has written for the musical.“This is my pride and joy,” she said in an interview. “This is a major, major turning point in my journey.”“Hell’s Kitchen” doesn’t precisely track the events of Keys’s own life, but there are strong parallels. Set in the 1990s, it takes place over a few months in the life of a 17-year-old named Ali, who is being raised by a single mother in Manhattan Plaza, a large housing complex where many of the residents are performing artists; there is family tension, sexual exploration and musical discovery. (Ali, like Keys, is transformed by a passion for piano.)Keys has been deeply involved with the show’s development, and her own production company has the commercial rights to whatever life the show might have beyond the Public. “I’m never hands off,” Keys said. “There’s not one page, there’s not one sheet, there’s not one word, there’s not one song, there’s not one melody, there’s not anything that happens in this piece that moves without me completely immersed in it and ensuring its authenticity.”The musical was Keys’s idea, and in 2011 she selected the playwright Kristoffer Diaz (“The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity”) to write its book; in 2018, the two asked Michael Greif (“Rent”) to join the project as director, and Greif then brought it to the Public.“It’s very much about a young woman testing boundaries,” Greif said. “It’s a story about a series of collisions she has with very important people in her life when she’s 17, and how those collisions affect the person she was to become.”“Hell’s Kitchen” is scheduled to begin previews Oct. 24 and to open Nov. 19. An emerging actor named Maleah Joi Moon will play Ali; her mother will be played by Shoshana Bean (“Wicked”), and her estranged father will be played by Brandon Victor Dixon (“Hamilton”); Camille A. Brown will choreograph.The Public is already planning to stage “Hamlet” this summer, directed by Kenny Leon and starring Ato Blankson-Wood, as its sole Free Shakespeare in the Park production, but now will follow that with a new Public Works adaptation of “The Tempest,” with songs by Benjamin Velez and directed by Laurie Woolery. The Public Works program, which stages musical adaptations of classics featuring a handful of professional actors and a large ensemble of amateur New York City performers, began in 2013 with a different adaptation of “The Tempest.”“The Tempest” will be the final production at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park until 2025; the Public is trying to figure out whether and where it might stage a production next summer while the Delacorte is being renovated.In October, the Public will partner with NYU Skirball to present three Seán O’Casey plays staged by Ireland’s Druid theater.Starting in November at its downtown theater, the Public plans to stage “Manahatta,” a play that connects Manhattan’s Native American history with its contemporary finance industry, written by Mary Kathryn Nagle and directed by Woolery. That will be followed in February by “The Ally,” written by Itamar Moses and directed by Lila Neugebauer, starring Josh Radnor as an atheistic Jew whose social justice commitments are complicated by Middle East politics. In March comes “Sally & Tom,” written by Suzan-Lori Parks and directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, about a contemporary theater company trying to do a play about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. And in April is “Jordans,” written by Ife Olujobi and directed by Whitney White, a comedy about Blackness in an overwhelmingly white workplace.One thing the Public will not be doing: presenting its previously annual Under the Radar Festival of experimental work. “It’s entirely a financial decision,” said Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director. “This does not mean the Public is abandoning its relationship with downtown experimental artists, but we’re going to be looking for a new way of embodying that.” More