Theatre in Review: Where We Belong (Public Theater)

	Madeline Sayet. Photo: Joan Marcus

In Where We Belong, Madeline Sayet details her tortured relationship with Shakespeare's plays. So troubled is this affair that it's a wonder she and the Bard didn't break up long ago.

Sayet, a Native-American theatre director, writer, and scholar of note, has constructed this oddly scattershot solo show around her decision to pursue a PhD in England. "My area of research is the relationship between the Indigenous peoples of America and Shakespeare's plays," she says. As it happens, her British sojourn turns out to be a source of profound anxiety and displacement. Her mother, a prominent figure in the Mohegan Tribe, takes a dim view of the plan. ("Sooooo, you think you're a white person now?" is a favorite mantra.) Indeed, her Mohegan family largely sticks to its base in Connecticut, on the theory that "our medicine relies on being home, being where our ancestors can look after us." Sayet herself wonders, "Am I running? Or is this my chance to do something important?"

While abroad, she reaps a harvest of self-serving praise from English academics, who fawn over her anti-colonial reading of The Tempest. But she is painfully aware of being the intellectual flavor of the month. (Her concept of Shakespeare as "anti-colonial" is interesting as far as it goes, but it seems to be of limited utility outside The Tempest.) "They were thrilled when I arrived as a Native Shakespeare scholar because they thought that meant Native people chose Shakespeare as superior," she says, making clear that this is not the case. Giving a lecture to a white audience, her ideas about "indigenizing" Shakespeare fall on deaf ears; instead, hands are raised, and questions are asked: "I thought you were going to tell us about your love of Shakespeare?"

That issue goes unaddressed in Where We Belong. "Shakespeare is a weapon," Sayet says. "So, I picked it up and tried to wield it/I truly believed that maybe, maybe if in the 21st century there was a Mohegan girl, the/Descendent of generations of chiefs and medicine people, that was a Shakespeare director/That that would mean something." But this utilitarian approach is not the same thing as being deeply engaged with the playwright's works. For her, they are, apparently, a means to an end; as a teenager, she notes, "I take comfort in words I can understand: In plays/In Shakespeare/In language society cares about, unlike my broken language/Shakespeare makes me normal." Indeed, there are moments when one wonders if, for her, Shakespeare isn't more a burden than a joy.

Ultimately, Sayet's unhappy scholarly experience is a narrow lens through which to view her larger subject, namely this country's shameful treatment of its Indigenous peoples, a history shaped by many lies and cultural amnesia. Indeed, Where We Belong is filled with compelling digressions that snag one's attention away from the subject at hand. Sayet discusses the destruction of the Mohegan language and the painful, painstaking efforts at recreating it. She offers details, both fascinating and dismaying, about how an eighteenth-century plan to create "Indian colleges" instead led to the founding of Dartmouth. The outrages continue to the present moment. As she pointedly notes, "To be Native in Connecticut is basically to be told every day that you don't exist and decide whether or not today's the day it's worth fighting about."

To be sure, Sayet has a sharp sense of humor, for example discussing how her parents' divorce lead to dueling meals on Thanksgiving, "a day already rife with tension" for obvious reasons. As an adolescent, she makes the mortifying discovery that her Mohegan name has been mistranslated and the correct version sounds exactly like a certain sexual act; this is a source of hilarity to her elders. She conjures a wickedly accurate chorus of producers who hire her to direct productions only to backtrack, asking for little more than "feathers and fringe. Some Native flair."

But none of this prevents Where We Belong from being an oddly unfocused affair, filled with fascinating facts and ideas that never quite coalesce into a powerful argument. Part of this is because of Sayet's tendency to editorialize. One of the most gripping sequences is a trip to the British Museum, where a curator cluelessly goes on about the institution's extensive collection of Indigenous artworks (most of them mislabeled) and human remains. His self-satisfied rendering of museum policy is bone-chilling, but its effect is vitiated by Sayet's frequent interruptions, as if she needs to make sure we are properly horrified.

It may also be true that Sayet is not the best interpreter of her own writing. The director, Mei Ann Teo, hasn't been able to do anything with the performer's tense, rushed delivery, which often blows past surefire laughs and moments of insight. Another performer, with more distance on the material, might make a better case for the text.

Teo's production includes other unhelpful elements. The production design by Hao Bai, a shiny stage deck that curves upward to become the upstage wall, also features an arrangement of light tubes that sometimes lowers in, creating glare and making it hard to see Sayet's face. Sound designer Erik Schilke has also provided compositions that occasionally threaten to drown out the star. But at least Asa Benally's single costume feels appropriate.

Where We Belong concludes on a rather tacked-on feel-good note, suggesting that Sayet has managed to resolve her internal contradictions and find a rewarding academic position with many Native American peers and students. It would be interesting to know how she got there; doing so might help clarify this piece, which, as it stands, could use a serious rethink. --David Barbour