San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Native Americans voice own stories onstage
Before the development of film and television, no art form but theater was more closely suited to bring stories to life. Yet rarely are stories told by and for an entire people as neglected in theater as those of Native Americans.
Through the month, Bay Area audiences will have a unique opportunity to experience new stories in two alternately candid and comic small-cast plays written, directed by and featuring Indigenous people.
These two plays, both making their world premieres, hold shared goals of bringing Native stories into the spotlight by weaving them from the contradictions with which many Native Americans live: preservation and integration, the traditional and the new, art and subsistence, dreams and fear.
But these productions differ in how they try to achieve these objectives, and in how they question what is necessary to the survival of Native people.
“Cashed Out,” directed by Tara Moses and written by Claude Jackson Jr., is at San Francisco Playhouse through Feb. 25. It seeks to present these contradictions through the eyes of a woman who defends her traditions while forging her own identity in the modern world. “Pueblo Revolt,” — directed by Reed Flores, written by Dillon Chitto and presented by AlterTheater in Berkeley through Feb. 12 and Feb. 15-26 in San Rafael — explores the forging of Native identity through the very breakdown of these traditions during the era of revolt against colonial Spanish rule.
“Cashed Out” concerns the struggles of Rocky, a member of the Gila River Indian Community reservation in Arizona. Played by Rappahannock tribe member Rainbow Dickerson, Rocky tries to reconcile her traditional culture, the inroads made upon it by the gambling industry and her integration with non-native culture.
The work is a full-length development of a one-scene, 10-minute-long play of the same name by Jackson, a Gila River member and attorney. It debuted in November 2019 at the Wells Fargo Theater in the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles. Months after that play won the Native Voices award at the 2019 Autry Short Play Festival, S.F. Playhouse featured it in a weekly pandemic-era “Zoomlet,” a live-streamed table-read series the company hosted from September 2020 to March 2022. Following an enthusiastic audience response to its Oct. 19, 2020, reading, the Playhouse commissioned Jackson to write a full-length play.
“Since I situated the 10-minute version of ‘Cashed Out’ as the climax (of the longer play), my initial buildup was a linear narrative, and as a result, the first full-length draft had a screenplay feel to it,” explained Jackson, who wrote, produced and directed a feature film, “In Circles,” with his brother Roberto Jackson in 2015. “After that draft, I spent a lot of time tightening up the characters and chronology and using specifically theatrical devices.”
Dickerson, who also starred in Jackson’s shorter version of the play, added that working with him on the extended stage play allowed her to better develop the character she portrays. For instance, her initial choice to present the character as appearing disheveled and acting erratically was written into the full-length play.
“My guiding principle when shaping this character has been the responsibility I feel when presenting an illness like addiction,” she said, “to show it well-roundedly enough that the audience understands how someone gets to that point.”
Just as Dickerson uses her role as actor to render Native American stories accessible to audiences, “Cashed Out” director Moses aims to create acting roles more accessible to Native Americans in theater. Moses, who is a Seminole tribe member, began her directing career after years as a stage actor made her realize the dearth of opportunities for Native Americans to convey their own stories.
“As Native Americans,” said Moses, “we’re the original storytellers. I felt that my agency as a director would give me the power to create opportunities for other Native artists, which were largely denied to me when I first began acting.”
“Pueblo Revolt” delves into the 1680 Pueblo Uprising as experienced by a gay Pueblo teenager, Feem Whim, played by Eduardo Soria, and his older brother Ba’homa, played by Steven Flores.
Chitto wrote the play not only from his experience as a New Mexico-raised Native American of Pueblo and Choctaw descent, but also from his years attending seminary school in Chicago.
“Having read sacred religious texts — the Bible, the Torah, the Quran — in terms of the universally relatable stories they present, I decided to write the story of my people in terms of these universal paradigms, so that the audience would relate to it as much as possible,” he said.
Director Flores said the two-person cast required him to align how he directs the play with how Chitto wrote it.
“Given that we’re staging the play in such atypical spaces in Berkeley and San Rafael,” Flores said, “there’s no backstage for the characters to hide in. The changes they undergo are all subtle or surreal.”
“I never meant to be a director when beginning my career,” added Flores, a CHamoru tribe member who was first an actor and singer, “but I’m most interested in creating art within my brown community here, and this proved to be the role where I can not only express my queerness in all of its forms, but also encourage others to do the same.”
He echoed Moses’ sentiment that the foremost challenge in producing and presenting an all-Native play — “not in terms of difficulty, but in terms of commitment” — is “building relationships.”
“Setting a historical precedent in a predominantly white institution requires trust between those involved,” Flores said.