“Manahatta” Sets The Hook

Before the curtain rises on Manahatta — now running at the Yale Repertory Theatre through Feb. 15 — there is an announcement in the theater, an acknowledgment that New Haven and Yale are built on Native American land, that other people were here first.

It’s an acknowledgment also heard at Long Wharf, at Arts Council events, and at smaller shows throughout town. Rarely, however, has the event that followed so ably showed the intense need for such an acknowledgment, and at the same time, demonstrated its near-futility compared to the monumental problem it seeks to address.

Manahatta, written by Mary Kathryn Nagle and directed by Laurie Woolery, begins when Jane Snake (Lily Gladstone) secures a job at Lehman Brothers somewhere around the beginning of the 21st century. She’s the one in her Lenape family who ​“got out”; she grew up in rural Oklahoma, but her gift for math secured her a place at MIT and, from there, a high-powered financial job, where she works alongside cocky Wall Street financiers Joe (Danforth Comins) and Dick Fuld (Jeffrey King). Meanwhile, her mother Bobbie (Carla-Rae), reeling from the loss of her husband and dealing with the enormous medical bills he left behind, decides to mortgage her family’s house to banker and devout Christian Michael (T. Ryder Smith) and his adopted son Luke (Steven Flores), who is also Lenape and has always had a thing for Jane and isn’t afraid to show it whenever Jane visits home. Jane’s sister Debra (Shyla Lefner), also still in Oklahoma, is on a mission to help preserve the Lenape language and thus help maintain her people’s connection to their long past.

Another strand of the plot, interspersed and something intermingled with the more present-day story, follows the purchase of Manahatta — that is, the island of Manhattan — by Dutch East India representative Peter Minuit from the Lenape. Each of the actors play dual roles as Lenape or colonists, and we see first the complex relationship the Lenape develop with the Dutch through trade, and then — after Minuit believes a purchase has been made — the depredations and finally atrocities the colonists force upon the Lenape not long after the deal is made.

The entwining of the present and the past works. Nagle isn’t interested in making simple, surface-levels parallels between the colonization of Manhattan and present-day capitalism. Rather, her collapsing of history shows, rather deftly, how the twin forces of then-nascent capitalism and zealous Christianity grew into the system we live under today — and how Native Americans got the sharp end of both from the very beginning. Just as quickly, the play juxtaposes these extreme beliefs with those of the Lenape, who take a longer, slower, more even-keeled and tempered approach.

For instance, in a scene that feels like watching a glass drop in slow motion, Nagle suggests that the sale of the island of Manhattan was possible due to the Lenape’s very different understanding of human beings’ relationship to the land. In Nagle’s depiction, the Lenape talking to Peter Minuit don’t connect to Minuit’s specific concept of land ownership because they don’t need it. They live on the land and allow others to live there, too, with each person having as much right to it as anyone else, a powerful idea that carries down through the centuries to Bobbie as she mortgages her house to Michael’s bank to pay for her deceased husband’s medical bills. The genocide and destitution of the Lenape (and, of course, all Native Americans) is never far from the frame. But Nagle also takes a sharp eye to the system the colonists created, its zeal to create convert to Christianity and accumulate wealth that has led to a chaotic, predatory system that perhaps benefits hardly anyone — even Wall Street financiers — for very long.

It’s also worth mentioning that Manahatta is also quite funny. The cultural misunderstandings between the colonists and the Lenape are often quite funny (until they become tragic); Jane’s conversations with her co-workers have a savage wit about them; and Bobbie’s general outlook on the problems facing her makes for some very wry asides. Nagle’s play gives each of the characters a good deal of dimension, and each of the actors then fully develops the characters into fully formed human beings. Comins and King give their financiers a surprising compassion, and Comins gets a chance to show his colonist’s mixed feelings for what is unleashed upon the Lenape. Smith gets to show that his character’s deep faith makes him kind as often as it makes him judgmental. Flores plays Luke — and his 17th century counterpart, Se-ket-tu-may-qua, as a man who is much smarter than he initially lets on. Lefner gives Debra a fundamental yet conflicted decency.

In many ways, however, the play belongs to Jane and Bobbie, a daughter striking out into a world geographically, culturally, and monetarily thousands of miles away from where she was born, and a mother assiduously trying to tend for her culture’s roots. Nagle’s play is far too good to make their relationship simply one of conflict. Bobbie is proud of Jane, even as she and Debra both lambast her for not visiting home enough. For her part, Jane is doing her best to be a trailblazer as a Lenape woman working in finance. As the 2007 financial crisis sweeps them all up in its fury, the characters’ actions yield complicated questions with no easy answers. Is Jane breaking into the world of finance or selling out to it? Or both? Or neither? And how would you tell the difference? Is Bobbie’s mortgaging of the house really ignorance of the banking system, or does she have a larger agenda in mind, rooted in her Lenape understanding of the world? As Jane, Gladstone embodies her conflicts and contradictions with nervous ease. But Carla-Rae’s performance of Bobbie is perhaps the most moving. In lesser hands, the character could seem either too silly or too wise; Carla-Rae gets the balance just right, making Bobbie a woman who knows exactly what she wants, and who knows how to accept the consequences.

Manahatta’s best move is to let no one off the hook — particularly the largely white audience members in attendance on opening night. We may acknowledge that we now live on land stewarded by the Mohegan, the Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugusset, Niantic, Quinnipiac, and other Algonquin peoples, and we may be moved by the story we see in Nagle’s play. But what are we doing about it? We are still caught up in the system started in the colonial era, still prey to its booms and its busts, its unending chase for wealth and its ruinations. Nagle’s play suggests that Native Americans, its first victims, have learned to use the wisdom embedded in their culture to survive it, if barely. Perhaps we could help them do better; perhaps, with humility, we could also learn a thing or two from them how to survive it when the whole thing finally collapses. Oh, do you really think it’ll last forever?

Manahatta runs at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St., through Feb. 16. Visit the theater’s website for tickets and more information.