Manahatta – 02 December 2023

It has become common practice for a lot of cultural organizations to print land acknowledgements bringing awareness to the indigenous tribes that are the original stewards of the land the theatre stands on. The Public Theater has gone above and beyond this commitment, and in the past couple of years has been one of very few large theatres to feature indigenous American voices telling stories that speak to the realities of their experience.

The beauty of Manahatta lies in its duality– the delicate balance between adaptation and assimilation. This plays out in the story of Jane, an ambitious Lenape woman who travels to New York to work on Wall Street. She is the western definition of success– a highly educated woman with a high stress, high paying job. She is laser focused on her career, partially motivated by the fear that if she fails at this job, no one on Wall Street will ever hire another woman of her heritage.

At the same time, she has lost sight of her roots. While she is interviewing for the job in New York, her father dies in Oklahoma, and her mother is forced to mortgage the house to pay the medical bills. Her mother decides to conceal the financial woes. The story comes to its climax when Jane’s mother loses her house, and Jane comes home to discover that her mother defaulted on the same kind of bank loan that has made Jane rich. Jane has transformed from the oppressed culture being forced out of her ancestral home to the oppressor benefitting from others’ losses of their homes.

Although Jane tries to make it right by buying her mother’s home, her mother turns her back and won’t accept the money from a daughter whose return to her ancestral homeland (the Lenape lived in modern day Manhattan before being forcibly relocated to Oklahoma) has transformed her into someone who is comfortable profiting from the same kind of pain that was inflicted on her own family several generations back.

At the same time that Manahatta plays with questions of stolen land, family, and belonging in a modern day world, the same actors reenact the story of how the Dutch acquired Manhattan through similar losses of trust and manipulation of relationships. Just as Jane was motivated to be a successful native woman in an industry full of white men, the Dutch settlers are depicted as seeking approval from their superiors and understanding that their survival in this unfamiliar environment hinged upon establishing themselves and the validity of their existence.

Playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle masterfully tells a story that humanizes indigenous Americans, not by showing the ways in which they are distinct from white Americans, but by honestly depicting settlers and natives as capable of the same cruelties and kindnesses, naive moments and knowing selfishness. Characters of both cultures are fully capable of turning a blind eye to suffering, as well as being unable to. These juxtapositions are powerful beyond measure.

The staging of Manahatta was brilliant in every way. Thanks to Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s lighting design and Lux Haac’s costume design, I was never confused about what moment we were in, or what parallels were being drawn. Director Laurie Woolery’s ingenious staging made every single seat in the three quarter thrust Anspacher Theater a great place to see the show. Woolery used the vomitoriums to make sure the actors never had their backs to the audience, and really maximized the space with purposeful, effective blocking that assisted the shifts in time without relying on blackouts and other overused theatre conventions to transition between ideas. The story flowed seamlessly, and was captivating the whole way through.

The script had every component of good theatre: creating and destroying audience perceptions of which characters were good, educating without preaching, evoking intense emotion as well as laughter, finding relatable moments, and ultimately sending the audience home with thoughts, questions, and insight.

I did not attend this performance on a press pass.