Manahatta, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Or: The Well Worn Trail

Theater really shouldn’t come with a pause button. While the pandemic has opened up productions by some of the finest companies for those willing to pay for it, eliminating the scarcity of time and location, the form necessarily means that you lose the presence of a space. This makes the art poorer because you’re not sharing the experience with living humans, the ones on stage, or next to you, or whose influence created the space of the story unseen, but it also cuts the experience because a show, like mary Katherine Nagel’s Manahatta, which should be viewed as a unstoppable fracturing of events, at home one is compelled to stop the video, go outside and yell at Capitalism.

Twining the story of the so called “Sale” of Manhattan and the 2008 Financial crisis, Nagel’s script works best when the worlds of past and recent present mirror each other. The white world, whether that comes from a stockade or a skyscraper uses the exact same lines to justify its paternalistic and ultimately bloody actions. For example, a Jesus besotted banker (Michael Jonas Michaelius) gently twists the arm of Bobbie (Sheila Tousey), a Lenape elder in financial straights, by promising more favorable loans if she comes to his church. On Manahatta, the same actor plays a woefully naive preacher who lurks about the forest, lungeing out at unguarded Lenape to tell them about the blood of Christ. More bitterly (but no less hilariously) is when Dutch Governor Peter Minuit (Jeffrey King, doubling as Wall Street Mogul Dick Fuld) demands a wall be built to keep the Indians out, while his conflicted right hand (the wonderful elegant Danforth Comins) that “We don’t have resources to build a wall.” Laughter from the 2018 audience can still be shared by the single viewer in 2021.

Director Laurie Woolery seamlessly cultivates this sense of timelessness on Mariana Sanchez’s mercurial set which embodies both Wall Street Office, spartan Oklahoman home, and the ice aged rocks that sleep in central park of past and present. It also provides eddies in the whirling air of financial crisis and cultural apocalypse to pool and flash; the discussions between Bobbie and her daughters Debra (Rainbow Dickerson) wanting to launch a language program and Jane (Tanis Parenteau), financial high roller who attempts to walk in both worlds, these and the lessons of Se-ket-tu-may-qua (Steven Flores) one of the original traders and translators, whose befuddlement and earnestness comes, of course, to no good. The moments of sarcasm and teaching spark in what otherwise are quickly sketched characters (naive native girl, long suffering matriarch, childish CEO).

From the moment we see Bobby consider mortgaging her house to pay off a (hideously unnecessary) medical bill the path to ruin seems pretty clear. And the need to yell at Capitalism becomes overwhelming. But it’s all, (even if it is mostly) doom and gloom. The story of the Native nations, their community and beliefs, having survived so much to the present moment is touched with a bright shine (perhaps given a little too much polish, though. Soapboxes do have a tendency to appear under characters at the least piece. But some stories you need to scrub, so there you are.) Still, the warmth is very much reminiscent of the bitter cinders it had to become to get here with horrors of the boarding schools and “red skin” (literally, a flayed piece of skin used as proof of death, your fun fact of the day.) The moments of spoken Lenape, handed to strangers or passed down the generations, refresh and brighten us (while the much more prevalent financial language remains spiky and unintelligible.

I wish I had been in the theater, forced to be witness to the gouges of greed and racism, and earn the tiny coin of hope that a better, smaller, more human way can be recovered. Yelling at the Invisible Hand is a great deal of fun, but it’s not art, and there’s no opportunity for you to learn, or grow.