EGN NEWS DESK
Rapid-fire punchlines and artful sight gags might not appear the obvious means to convey a brutal historical past of displacement and extermination. But “Between Two Knees,” which opened on the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Manhattan on Tuesday, makes use of each in an audaciously sidesplitting comedy that’s an indictment of Native American persecution.
The present’s antic account of Indigenous wrestle was written by the 1491s, an intertribal sketch comedy troupe that features Sterlin Harjo, a creator of “Reservation Dogs.” The motion is bookended by two lethal standoffs: the 1890 bloodbath at Wounded Knee, the place U.S. troopers killed as many as 300 members of the Lakota Sioux tribe, and the occupation of that website in 1973 by the American Indian Movement and its supporters, who had been protesting authorities injustice.
A narrator named Larry (Justin Gauthier) welcomes the viewers with the informal air of a stand-up breaking within the crowd, saying that Indians have skilled some “fairly darkish” stuff. White viewers members are warned that guilt pangs lie forward — and inspired to assuage them by depositing donations right into a basket being handed round. “Don’t be low cost now,” Larry prods. “I promise, whenever you depart, you’ll nonetheless personal every little thing.”
Playful daggers like these are cloaked all through the manufacturing, directed with ingenuity and finesse by Eric Ting, with a vaudeville-style emphasis on amusement and artifice.
When we meet Ina (a wryly deadpan Sheila Tousey) clutching her child through the Wounded Knee bloodbath, for instance, an ensemble member demonstrates the severity of Ina’s wounds by detaching her false arm and absconding offstage with it. (Victims of the siege, lots of them girls and kids, had been unarmed.) A pink streamer unfurls from Ina’s shoulder like a clown’s handkerchief, the present’s recurring signifier of bloodshed.
Ina’s homicide begins a multigenerational story that follows her descendants’ turmoil by way of the twentieth century: Ina’s orphaned son Isaiah (Derek Garza) and his love curiosity, Irma (Shyla Lefner), defeat the depraved nuns at their Native American boarding college (a video-game-style showdown with witty projections by Shawn Duan) to change into vigilantes. Their son William, a.okay.a. Wolf (Shaun Taylor-Corbett), departs to battle in World War II. A cascade of soapy twists, together with a child left on a doorstep, finally leads the household again to Wounded Knee.
It’s quite a lot of floor to cowl, as Larry admits throughout a extra unwieldy second act. Presented collectively by Yale Repertory Theater and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the place the play was commissioned as a part of a collection on U.S. historical past, “Between Two Knees” takes inventive benefit of the truth that a lot of its material can be unfamiliar to viewers who should not Native Americans, gathering a sprawl of historic incidents right into a fictional family-tree narrative.
The creative staging contains caricature-skewering costumes by Lux Haac and shape-shifting surroundings by Regina García, which assist this pageant-on-steroids manufacturing imbue even probably the most devastating atrocities with components of shock and delight; a number of are marked by musical numbers (authentic songs are by Ryan RedCorn, with choreography by Ty Defoe). The ensemble of eight inhabits a head-spinning roster of characters with unfaltering versatility, together with James Ryen as an array of strongmen and Rachel Crowl as zany villain sorts.
The 1491s — Harjo, Dallas Goldtooth, Migizi Pensoneau, RedCorn and Bobby Wilson — enjoy mocking ignorant stereotypes with self-conscious irreverence. They additionally level to the self-soothing of professional forma rituals like land acknowledgments, which gloss over legacies of slaughter whereas asking little greater than cursory consideration from chastised listeners.
That “Between Two Knees” manages to tickle so ferociously with one hand and seize throats with the opposite is a uncommon feat. Maybe this time the lesson will lastly stick.
Between Two Knees
Through Feb. 25 on the Perelman Performing Arts Center, Manhattan; pacnyc.org. Running time: 2 hours half-hour.
