A world premiere! How can one not be excited about that?
Borderlands Theater has opened its 2009-2010 season with Julie
Jensen’s brand-new play, She Was My Brother. The theater has
dedicated its season to the theme “What’s Under That Skirt? A
Borderline Look at Gender,” and right out of the gate, Jensen and
Borderlands have given us a lot to think about.
The play—about the phenomenon of Native American
“two-spirits,” who have the physical attributes of one sex but identify
with the other—was born in a workshop at the Kennedy Center in
Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2008, given a rehearsed reading at
the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis in the fall of 2008, and given
staged readings earlier this year at Salt Lake Acting Company and at
the Missoula Colony in Montana.
Borderlands is the first theater to give the play a full staging.
Unfortunately, it’s not quite ready for prime time.
Certainly, the idea that sparked the play is fascinating and worthy
of dramatic exploration. Historically, among the Zunis and other Native
Americans, the two-spirits assume the dress and work of their
“soul”—the gender they identify with. Known as Lamana, they are
not only accepted within their communities; they hold positions of
leadership and command great respect.
This practice, of course, contrasts sharply with Western culture,
and it’s a fact about these native cultures that is not widely
known.
Borderlands has given She Was My Brother an impressive
production design and committed actors, but the play just isn’t enough
to carry an evening. And here’s why: The script breaks the cardinal
rule of playwriting, and of storytelling in general. It tells us
what happens instead of showing us.
Loosely based on historic reality, the story involves a small team
of ethnologists who have traveled to northwest New Mexico in the late
1800s to study the Zuni nation. The colonel, whom we never see, has
become ill, and he and his wife, Tullis (Martie van der Voort), must
return to Washington, D.C., to seek medical care, leaving young
protégé Wilson behind.
Wilson, played by Brian Levario, struggles to survive on his own for
several weeks, we are told, until he meets We-Wah (Kalani Queypo), a
Zuni who introduces himself as Lamana. Wilson finds himself attracted
to Lamana and to the Zuni culture. When Tullis returns, she is a bit
shocked to see his transformation.
Plays, and all effective storytelling, are driven by conflict. They
show us characters’ struggles with others and within themselves. In
She Was My Brother, real conflicts between the
characters—as well as the broader conflict that would define and
give meaning to the play—are difficult to identify. We are told
about critical moments, or we simply see the evidence that something
momentous has happened. We don’t witness the process, and our
connections with the characters and their story suffer.
After Wilson realizes that his love for Lamana is acceptable to the
Zunis, he immerses himself in their culture. But we know this only
because he exits one scene in Western dress and enters the next dressed
in more Zuni-like garb. We don’t see his transformation. How did he
come to such a radical decision? What did it require of him? What
obstacles did he face? How was Lamana involved? We want to know. We
need to know. We want to be a part of the process.
Unfortunately, other plot elements are treated similarly.
Directed by Barclay Goldsmith, the actors approach their roles with
heart. But their characters are defined more by what they report than
what happens between them. This is a meager resource for actors to work
with.
John Longhofer’s set, a Zuni pueblo courtyard, is beautifully lit by
Russell Stagg. Jim Klingenfus handles the sound effectively, and Kathy
Hurst’s costumes are fine—especially the getup for the
ethnographer of the female persuasion.
Borderlands’ commitment to the development and production of new
plays is worth supporting. We admire that they have designated this a
season to explore issues of gender and identity. But sometimes when you
gamble, the payoff is not as great as you hope.
She Was My Brother hit notes, not chords. And while we can
certainly praise and enjoy those notes, we would appreciate the chords
even more.
This article appears in Oct 1-7, 2009.
The reviewer here and I must have come to the theatre from different worlds, different universes perhaps.
She found little or no action in She Was My Brother by Julie Jensen, playing now at Borderlands. She’d have much preferred The Indiana 500 or Die Hard 10–a motorcycle ride across high hurtles or rafting down the Colorado–all glorious adventures indeed.
She Was My Brother offered something else entirely. Another world, another era, another pace, an alternate view of reality. That night in the theatre provided a journey not possible today in real life, possible for only the most privileged in the late 19th century.
On that stage the audience actually saw and heard white people listening to an Indian. White people with ears, something many Indians did not think possible.
We in the audience had to wonder if our world could have been different if we had listened more often, listened better. Wondered what a world without gender prejudice would have been like. A world where whites learned from Indians and Indians learned about whites rather than the way things went down.
In the theatre that night we saw a young man and a middle-aged woman change more in one scene each than we’d ever seen on the stage. We saw three characters who knew how to love. And who were able to show their love.
At the end we were not dry eyed and we could not keep to our seats. We stood, clapped and felt deep gratitude.
We saw SHE WAS MY BROTHER on opening night at Borderlands Theater. It was one of the most amazing, most original plays we had ever seen. Perhaps your reviewer attended a different play and got her reviews mixed up. We cannot account for her response. A play that tells and does not show? This is a play about people from different cultures falling in love. That is what we watched. The things they talked about were merely the background for that very delicate and compelling action. We had never experienced a more original story better told. At the end, all of us rose to our feet in praise of this extraordinary experience. We had been entertained and moved. Thank you, Borderlands Theater, for choosing this play and for doing it so well. And we urge that your reviewer have another look. She did not see what we saw. –Linda Farrer and Janet Allen, Prescott, AZ
Insofar as one must think of art as process as much as product –and recognizing that it is frequently the tension between these two dimensions that opens precisely the door to theater as productive dialogue that can really matter, i.e. count for something other than just entertainment –then, insofar as these things can be true…….I would say that the critique Ms. Forrester makes of the play “She was my brother” MAY not be entirely off-base.
Yes, the play has some moments where one thinks: “uhmm, that dialogue [or that transition] does not seem to be fully cooked.” Fine observation. BUT, here’s the crucial and cardinal rule of criticism that Ms. Forrester misses and that leads me to not agree with her assessment: not conforming to a conventional narrative/performance arch is not necessarily ONLY a deficit; it can also be interpreted as an opportunity or even better yet, a conscious aesthetic/ethical stance. In her review of the staging done by Borderlands Theater Ms. Forrester assumes that the “gaps” encountered in the text/staging are a failure of good theater craftsmanship; she does not ask herself if perhaps these so called failures, standing in fact as “gaps” in our knowledge of Indians and of the complex politics (with small “p”) of the relationships of love and intimacy between Indians and colonizers/anthropologists, are not in fact, aesthetic devices themselves that playwright Julie Jensen has crafted with exceptional even-handedness. I saw the play and I believe this latter to be the case.
Jensen in fact has navigated the most treacherous waters in writing this play (the waters of academicism and didactic approaches to the HISTORY of anthropology or the POLITICS of gender and sexuality, etc…). She has succeeded in this play not so much because she tells us “everything” we ought to know (as Ms. Forrester suggests she should have done) but in fact her success in this play rests on her ability to find an aesthetics and a narrative structure that omits the impulse to tell us what things (of the heart, of the social intercourse in conditions of differential power) mean. I would argue that the aesthetic and staging choices Jensen and Goldsmith (the director) –not to mention the extraordinary work of the actors— made in this play are in effect the only approach that would WORK for a play that tackles themes of this magnitude in our social imaginary –in other words, it is an approach that works for the play to function as play, without making those of us in the audience feel that we were attending a lecture at the Smithsonian.
The way Jensen chose to tell the story was, point in fact, to skirt the heavy-handed narrativization that often accompanies tales of Indians and Whites —a persistent impulse to make these tales between unequal partners caught in the dense waters of desire and repulsion (the generalized attitudes that have characterized Red-White relations for centuries) into “tight narrative” events out of circumstances and emotions that were far more ambiguous, complicated, uncertain, and often, unresolved. Such was the case of the intimate relationship intimated (pun is on purpose) in Jensen’s play by the shadow figure represented by Wilson in the play (the ethnographer Frank Hamilton Cushing) and the historical persona of We’Wah (evoked by the character Lamana). Cushing was one of the first anthropologists castigated by his peers for “going native.” He was a difficult character who wrestled with loads of baggage of prejudice, imperial attitudes, and scienticism that he brought to Zuni, while at the same time “falling head over heels” in love with the Southwest and its native inhabitants (as many a reader of the Tucson Weekly can surely relate to). He only mentioned We’Wah once in all of his abundant written materials. Yet, the self-censorship of the “love affair” or perhaps psychological transference or perhaps the exotic desire to posses the subject as yet another “artifact” for the Smithsonian speaks more loudly than the written tracts Cushing did produce.
It is precisely in that what is un-spoken (and perhaps also “unspeakable”) that Jensen finds the moral imperative and narrative/artistic device most suitable to re-tell the story (albeit as a white woman playwright in the 21st century could tell it, which is certain to be different from the way a Zuni playwright may approach the subject). She hints at facts, leaves many of them hanging loose in the air….infuses the audience with a sense of complicity and at the same time confusion…..focuses the characters’ development on their emotional lives as these unfold for them, nebulous as that may be —yes, frequently “spoken for” by the master narrative of social conventions rather than with the benefit of full human agency –indeed, precisely the points that Ms. Forrester finds fault with are the points that make this play moving and poignant, especially for those of us non-Indians here in Tucson that know all too well the complex intertwining of intimacy and distancing that befalls our living in “Indian country.” Borderlands Theater tapped something in our social fabric with this play (a suitable world premiere for this region) that remains deeply misunderstood and rationalized among friends and neighbors.
I don’t agree with Sherilyn Forrester’s review of the play, “She Was My Brother.”
I attended the play, and found that it allowed for one’s imagination to fill in story gaps in a creative way. Studying a Picasso painting or a Louise Nevelson sculpture does not exactly tell us what happens in the artists’ minds. Rather these artists show us works of art that allow our imaginations to take us into unknown paths. That’s what is special about this play. Because of the delicacy of the subject matter the playwrite points to the void and dares us to jump in to gain a deeper understanding and respect for the characters. It took courage to write the play. It took courage to produce it. I learned a lot by attending the play. The actors drew me into a new and different world, and for a couple of hours, I forgot that wars are still raging in the world, and that the country is in the midst of an economic crisis.