Theatre has always loved a good property-in-peril story: Theban royals fighting for a throne; struggling salesmen worrying about their mortgages; Russian gentry losing their cherry orchards. Our sense of fairness is piqued when a place—Elsinore, a house in Brooklyn—might be wrested away from the person who has title to it. But what if rightful ownership isn’t possible, or is beside the point? It’s a tricky, delicate task to construct a drama around a hero who refuses to stake a claim.
In “Manahatta,” now at the Public, the playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle intertwines two stories of American disinheritance: the coercive removal of the Lenape from lower Manhattan, undertaken by land-hungry Dutch settlers, and the 2008 subprime-housing-loan collapse. In both the seventeenth century and the twenty-first, contract language obscures and enables predatory behavior. (The play was first staged at the Public in a studio production in 2014, and officially premièred at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.)
On (almost) modern-day Wall Street, Jane Snake (Elizabeth Frances), a mathematician, gets a securities-underwriting job at the investment bank Lehman Brothers, while, back home in Oklahoma, her mother, Bobbie (Sheila Tousey), takes out a risky mortgage, the very kind that riddles Lehman’s own vulnerable portfolio. Jane’s mother holds on to things lightly: she lets her house start to slip away, never telling her banker daughter about her debts, and she’s reluctant to lay claim to her Lenape language, even as her other daughter, Debra (Rainbow Dickerson), pleads with her to pass it on to the younger generation. Bobbie just shrugs, and opens her hands. She has nothing to offer.
The prodigal Jane’s story alternates with that of an eager young Lenape trader, Le-le-wa’-yu (also played by Frances), whose family signs a sales contract for the island of Manhattan with the director of the Dutch West India Company, Peter Minuit (Jeffrey King). The Lenape believe they have merely promised to trade in perpetuity, but the Dutch soon enforce their “ownership” of the land at musket-point. The production, too, layers past and present New York. The costume designer Lux Haac makes the Dutchmen’s slashed doublets out of modern pin-striped suiting material; Marcelo Martínez García’s set design accentuates the Anspacher Theatre’s neoclassical columns, which recall financial-district architecture, and the floor is studded with outcroppings of Manhattan schist. The Anspacher always shakes when a subway train passes below. Here, ancient bedrock seems to shake, too.
For all the cleverly choreographed interaction between the two time lines, each one is doggedly predictable. Neither Nagle nor the show’s director, Laurie Woolery, wants us to believe that Bobbie’s mortgage is ever going to get paid off, or to wonder, even for a moment, if the Dutch might mean well. And Nagle’s decision to focus on Jane has certain dramatic repercussions. Scenes set in the seventeenth century have life and vigor, particularly when Le-le-wa’-yu speaks Lenape with her companion Se-ket-tu-may-qua (Enrico Nassi), but the scenes at Lehman toggle between clichés of the blinkered career woman—Jane ignores romantic overtures from her home-town buddy Luke (also Nassi)—and globs of financial jargon. “I’ve got sellers like American Dream and ABC trying to jam in prior drops, and I mean, drops like a stated loan with CLTV above 90,” Jane rattles off to her boss, and no one, least of all Jane, seems to know what she means.
Yet, despite the production’s frequent clumsiness, there’s a pocket of grace at its center. Woolery encourages a broad, telegraphic style in her actors, but Tousey, as Bobbie, operates from a stillness as foundational as that Manhattan schist. At first, Bobbie seems like one of several characters who behave artificially for plot mechanics: she appears to have no reason other than pride to keep her bankruptcy a secret, a stance that becomes increasingly self-defeating and bizarre as the play pushes her into foreclosure. Why wouldn’t she do everything possible to keep the house, which was built by her grandfather? The dictates of Aristotelian drama, in which the climax should also reveal some hidden truth, seemed to be calling her narrative shots.
But Bobbie’s actions don’t just build the structure of “Manahatta”; they also—productively—break it. During the show’s next-to-last scene, she’s presented with the possibility of rescue, and she refuses. “We don’t own anything. We live in our home because the Creator gave it to us,” she tells her frazzled children, picking up a box and heading out the door. Much of the play has a kind of prosecutorial flavor: Nagle is also a lawyer, specializing in tribal sovereignty, and Jane and Debra’s attitude toward Manhattan becomes one of return, restitution, and reclamation. Jane’s final words even suggest that she sees her rise in the financial industry as a step toward undoing old Dutch wrongs. Bobbie, though, takes seriously the principle of non-ownership. She walks not only out of her house but out of the drama itself: a dispossession plot can have no power over a woman who won’t recognize its terms.
Bobbie at least has some stuff to take with her. In a dramatization at St. Ann’s Warehouse of J. M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning novel “Life & Times of Michael K,” from 1983, the man at the center of the story, a park gardener in Cape Town under apartheid, lives through a series of displacements, internments, and losses, casting away everything until his unburdenedness becomes a kind of sainthood.
The show was created by the director Lara Foot, of Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre Centre, in collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company, the same group that brought the twelve-foot-tall Little Amal, a partly animatronic representation of a Syrian refugee, to New York last year. The adaptation dispenses with some of Coetzee’s plot—Michael’s detached Buddha nature no longer attracts an acolyte, for instance—but preserves the book’s dreamlike quality. As Michael travels through a South Africa convulsed by a fictional civil war, first with his dying mother and then without her, starvation and exposure do not kill him; they only distill his yearning for purpose. The video designers Yoav Dagan and Kirsti Cumming project long roads or startling landscapes of rock and thornbush onto the set, and the mood drifts hypnotically as Michael approaches total attunement with the earth.
