T. Charles Erickson
“We gonna talk about war and genocide and PTSD and molestation. So it’s OK to laugh,” says Larry (Justin Gauthier), the amiable host of Between Two Knees, now playing at Yale Repertory Theatre through June 4. He reappears in a variety of guises and his deadpan commentary is one of the best things in the show. He enters the stage on a lift through a trapdoor, looking like an icon of Native American tribal lore, and he ends the show in a kind of glam Native American spacesuit, a way of saying that the people who were the earliest human inhabitants of the American continent will always be here, no matter what the future holds.
Written by the 1491s, “an intertribal indigenous sketch comedy troupe,” and directed by Eric Ting, who helped develop the show for its debut at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2019, the inventive and daring show is finally having its East Coast debut.
The show’s opening pitch is to confront its mostly White audience with their lack of knowledge about Native American massacres. A Wheel of Fortune-style wheel is spun (complete with theme song) to point out some local atrocities we might or might not be aware of, such as at Missituk (aka Mystic, Conn.). Eventually we get to the most infamous: the massacre of up to 300 Lakotans by the U.S. Army in 1890 at Wounded Knee, S.D. The occupation of the area by the American Indian Movement (AIM) in 1973, as a protest against U.S. oppression of Native American tribes, establishes the twin historical poles of the play’s main narrative and its title’s “two knees.”
With so many instances of violence and armed conflict — for good measure, the play also depicts Native Americans fighting for the U.S. in World War II and in the Vietnam War — Between Two Knees risks a lot in its insistence that “we,” the various racially and ethnically distinct varieties of Americans in the audience, can laugh about such events. The troupe’s script relies upon the tried and true method of irreverent sketch comedy, familiar from Saturday Night Live and the like, but extending back to vaudeville and, indeed, to those “Wild West shows,” such as Buffalo Bill’s, that featured set-pieces like Custer’s Last Stand (here a “last call” bar) and included among its “show Indians” Sitting Bull — “for a time.”
The latter phrase, as wielded by New Age Priest (Rachel Crowl), recurs in a mounting frenzy of absurdist history that is also, in its way, true. The show makes much of how the past becomes a series of sound bites to be trotted out for any occasion. Such rambling, scattershot satire, like sketch comedy generally, sometimes connects and sometimes makes odd swerves — as when an attack by a troop of nuns, both in animation and in costume and wielding, of course, nun-chuks, becomes a lengthy physical comedy routine.
Massacres and wars are bad enough, but then what can you expect when heavily armed people are sent to resolve issues? More disturbing is a subplot that involves a baby who survives the 1890 massacre only to end up in a boarding school designed to eradicate the cultural practices and belief systems of indigenous populations. Beside outright genocide, in other words, is the even more insidious enforced conformity to another system of beliefs — here wielded by a maniacal priest (again Rachel Crowl) — that was always a questionable import to this country.
That baby, renamed Isaiah, eventually flees the school with his love Irma. Their son, William (Shaun Taylor-Corbett), goes off to World War II. Much later, a child he fathered, called Eddie, is left to his grandparents to raise. The young Isaiah (Derek Garza) and Irma (Shyla Lefner) enact a romantic vision of love and its eventual eclipse into a kind of settled dullness. Their more elderly versions (Wotko Long and Shelia Tousey, respectively) are even more likable. Sitting on lawn chairs to the side of the stage, they seem to inhabit a space of reflection and fleeting wisdom punctuated by the inanities of age. It’s a delightful segment in a show that often tries a bit too hard to distract and entertain and hector.
The cast, which also includes Edward Astor Chin as, among others, George Washington, is spirited, most of its members enacting a variety of character parts that come and go with very fluid cues and some striking costume changes (Lux Haac, costume designer; Younghawk Bautista, wig and hair design). The production values are superlative, including animation (Shawn Duan, projection designer), lighting effects (Elizabeth Harper, lighting designer), and sound effects (Jake Rodriguez, sound designer), and a bewildering array of props, some very realistic, some comically fake, and devices and scenic elements (Cameron Camden, technical director, and Regina Garcia, scenic designer) including a little house that enacts a coital rhythm. The show’s physical routines — dance (Ty Defoe, choreographer), fights (Rod Kinter, fight director), romance (Kelsey Rainwater, intimacy director) — are impressive and serve to keep the show bouncing along.
The target of much of the wit is complacency that would see the past as past. That means trying to convince us that events no one present has lived through should be relevant to our sense of what justice entails. I’m very aware that maybe a dozen audience members on opening night — I’m one — and few in the cast are old enough to remember 1973. The members of the 1491s — Ryan RedCorn, Sterlin Harjo, Dallas Goldtooth, Migizi Pensoneau, and Bobby Wilson — look as though they may have been born around that time. Which is to say that the eras referenced in the play are very remote from the multicultural terms of our own times. And it’s those multicultural forces arrayed against White European dominance that inspire the show’s finale, where a what-if litany of utopian futures are interspersed with the catchy tune “so long, White people.”
The main takeaway of the play — for the White spectator — is to contemplate how “our” culture looks from the view of a pervasive non-White population that didn’t come here from elsewhere and that has a long history of grievance as well as diverse cultures of its own. The notion that all Whites share a single ethos is as absurd as suggesting that all Native Americans share a single language (other than English) or history (other than near-extinction at the hands of Whites). But, y’know, it’s good for a laugh.
Between Two Knees runs at Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St., through June 4. Visit the theater’s website for tickets and more information.
